Cristian Tomasetti, PhD

Dr. Cristian Tomasetti is an associate professor of oncology and biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Department of Oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Department of Biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Tomasetti’s work is recognized internationally for his paradigm-shift contributions to the current understanding of cancer etiology and tumor evolution. He has published several corresponding author papers in Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Three of his science papers were ranked #4, #15, and #22 by Altmetric for the attention they received among any research paper published in any scientific field by any journal for the years 2015, 2017, and 2018, respectively.

He also develops classification algorithms for the early detection of cancer using a combination of statistical analysis, probabilistic modeling and machine learning. In 2018 he published, as one of the corresponding authors, a new blood test methodology called CancerSEEK, for the early detection of eight different cancer types.

Dr. Tomasetti earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in December 2010. 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 from January 2011 to June 2013. He then served as an assistant professor until December 2017.