Christopher McFarland

Dissertation Title:  The role of deleterious passengers in cancer PhD Dissertation Advisor:  Dr. Leonid A. Mirny, Institute for Medical Engineering in Science, MIT For his dissertation research, Chris developed mathematical models of cancer progression and then compared these models to recent cancer genomics datasets. They found that many mutations arising during cancer progression are harmful to cancerous cells, but accumulate in the population nevertheless. These mutations alter progression, can explain therapeutic outcomes, and may be exploitable by new therapies.