Jan 13
Biology Seminar: Layla Oesper, Carleton College: Tumor Evolution: What is it? How do we measure it? What does it tell us?
Tumors evolve as part of an evolutionary process where distinct sets of genomic mutations accumulate in different cell lineages descending from an original founder cell. A better understanding of how such tumor lineages evolve over time, which mutations occur together or separately, and in what order these mutations were gained may yield important insight into cancer and how to treat it. Thus, in recent years there has been an increased interest in computationally inferring the evolutionary history of a tumor – that is, a rooted tree where vertices represent populations of cells that have a unique complement of somatic mutations and edges that represent ancestral relationships between these populations. However, accurately inferring these trees from sequencing data is often a challenging process. In this talk, I will discuss the basics of tumor evolution and will describe several methods designed in my lab that address issues related to the inference and analysis of tumor evolution.
Layla Oesper is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Dr. Oesper received her B.A. in mathematics from Pomona College and her Sc.M and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. Dr. Oesper is also the recipient of NSF CRII and CAREER Awards. Her lab focuses on the design of computational methods related to inference and analysis of cancer evolution.