Christopher Mcfarland

Chris McFarland is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov Lab (2014-now). He was a CEGH fellow from 2014-2015 and Cancer Systems Biology Fellow. He study cancer using evolutionary modeling. In Leonid Mirny's lab at MIT, he used population genetics modeling and genomic analysis to argue that tumors accumulate many 'deleterious passenger' mutations that are harmful to cancer cells and possibly exploitable by existing and future therapies. He is now working in the Petrov Lab, along with folks in Monte Winslow's lab, to understand how various genetic events combine to induce lung cancer. Intriguingly, we find that the same combinations of genetic events sometimes progresses cells to cancer and sometimes do not. He want to quantitatively describe this variability and understand its origins.