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Dear Colleagues,
It has been quite an exciting year! Our Institute marked its 5th anniversary with a fantastic symposium - our first one in-person since March 2020 - highlighting the latest mathematical and computational methods in cancer research and many other biological fields. A hundred people were in attendance to hear from more than 30 national and international speakers describing their work on cancer 'omics, population genetics, computational biology, probability, and statistics.
The IICD now includes over 90 researchers (50+ core members) across 13 Columbia departments/research institutes and seven universities worldwide. Anne van Delft (Assistant Professor of Statistics) joined the Institute as an associate member, and Karol Nowicki-Osuch (a former IICD associate research scientist who recently became a Junior Group Leader at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)) joined the Institute as an affiliate member.
Our researchers established collaborations with various partners at Columbia, including Columbia University Irving Medical Center, the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Zuckerman Institute, as well as external institutions, such as New York Genome Center, MSK Cancer Center, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and more.
In the summer of 2023, the Institute welcomed the second IICD Summer Research Program cohort. Eight non-Columbia undergraduate interns carried out research projects from mathematical modeling of B cell evolution to spatial mapping of tumor microenvironment. In addition to research, they engaged in weekly seminars and networking events. Applications are currently open to select our 2024 cohort. We hosted an MS student from the École Polytechnique (France) again through our partnership with the Alliance program.
We also held many seminars about cancer-related research at the intersection of mathematical sciences and biology throughout the year. Most of our events occurred in a hybrid format, allowing researchers outside the Columbia community to join. The full line-up for our upcoming events can be found here.
Many of our researchers received awards and grants during the past year. Samuel Aparicio was a co-PI on one of the two NYGC research projects selected by the NIH Common Fund under the Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues Network last Spring. Elham Azizi received an R01 and an R21 grant from the NIH to develop machine learning methods for interpreting spatial multi-omics data. She was also recently named the 2024 Innovators in Science Award Early-Career Scientist Winner in Cancer Immunology.
Andrew Blumberg and Anne van Delft were awarded an NSF grant to design a statistical framework to analyze random objects' evolution in shape and topological structure. Ivan Corwin was a finalist for the 2023 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. In collaboration with Yvon Woappi, Bianca Dumitrascu was awarded a 2023 Data Science Institute seed grant to study wound healing through machine learning and experiments. Abigail Hickok won the inaugural Ivo and Renata Babuška Thesis Prize in recognition of the outstanding contributions in her PhD thesis and received the 2024 Association for Women in Mathematics Dissertation Prize.
Kevin Hoffer-Hawlik received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to model the dynamic tumor-immune interactions in melanoma in response to immunotherapy using machine learning and multiplexed scRNA-seq experiments. Justin Hong and Achille Nazaret placed first in the 2023 GSK.ai CausalBench Challenge earlier this year. José McFaline-Figueroa and Elham Azizi were named among the 2023 Allen Distinguished Investigators in collaboration with Mijo Simunovic to explore how sex hormones influence early organ development.
Karol Nowicki-Osuch and I lead a subproject focusing on ecDNA and its role in the progression of esophageal cancer as part of the MacMillan Center for the Study of the Non-Coding Cancer Genome at the New York Genome Center. Presha Rajbhandari received the newly established Charles H. Turner Award for Postdoctoral Studies in Biological Sciences. Sanket Rane was awarded an NIH R01 grant for an innovative integrative project synthesizing mathematical and experimental strategies to study B cell evolution.
Sohrab Salehi earned a K99/R00 award to develop a new class of scalable statistical models to help identify causal determinants of treatment failure in small-cell lung cancer and metastasis in high-grade serous ovarian cancer and gastric adenocarcinoma. Lingting Shi was awarded a T32 grant from the Genome and Epigenome Integrity in Cancer Training Program leadership. Brent Stockwell was elected to the National Academy of Medicine earlier this year. Finally, Sanja Vicković received a two-year grant from Target ALS to create a spatial genomics resource for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis-Frontotemporal Dementia neuropathies.
I am very proud of our Institute’s achievements over the past year. We have continued to expand our reach in the cancer research field while fostering a collaborative and supportive community of researchers. I am particularly pleased with the success of our outreach and education programming and the ongoing collaborations that our researchers have established with other institutions and organizations. We are also working on a summer school program for graduate students and postdocs and planning our next symposium. Keep an eye on our upcoming newsletters for exciting updates!
I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together in the coming year and beyond.
With best wishes from the IICD,
Simon Tavaré
Director, Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics
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