Dr. Cristian Tomasetti is the Director of the Center for Cancer Prevention and Early Detection at City of Hope, Professor and Director of the Division of Mathematics for Cancer Evolution and Early Detection In the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine of the Beckman Research Institute, and Professor and Director of the Division of Integrated Cancer Genomics of the Translational Genomics Research Institute.

Dr. Tomasetti’s work is recognized internationally for his paradigm-shift contributions to the current understanding of cancer etiology and tumor evolution. By combining mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and machine learning, with experimental, epidemiological, and DNA sequencing data, he has provided the first quantitative evidence for the large role in cancer causation played by the normal, i.e. endogenous, accumulation of somatic mutations in the cells of the human body. As an applied mathematician, he also currently leads the effort to develop novel blood tests and classification algorithms for the early detection of cancer as well as for monitoring cancer patients.

Before joining City of Hope and TGen, he was an Associate Professor of Oncology and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, in both the Department of Oncology (Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center) and the Department of Biostatistics (Bloomberg School of Public Health).

Dr. Tomasetti holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park (Dec. 2010). After his Ph.D., he was a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics of the Harvard School of Public Health and in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Jan. 2011 – Jun. 2013), after which he became a faculty member at Hopkins (Assistant Professor, Jul. 2013 – Dec. 2017).