Ignacio Vázquez-García, PhD
Dr. Ignacio Vázquez-García is a Research Fellow in Computational Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Columbia University, under the mentorship of Dr. Sohrab Shah and Dr. Simon Tavaré. He investigates the mechanisms of spatio-temporal tumor evolution, progression and therapy response in ovarian cancer. His current research uses scalable inference methods and modeling of single-cell genomic and in situ imaging data to study the co-evolution of the tumor and immune ecosystem in ovarian cancer, which plays a major role in driving relapse in specific subtypes of this disease. He leads a clinical study (MSK SPECTRUM) that leverages patient samples to characterise the clonal evolution of the disease prior to and after treatment, the variation in mutational processes and the role of malignant-immune cell interactions, with the ultimate goal of establishing predictive biomarkers and stratifying patients on successful treatment regimens. Dr. Vázquez-García received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Imperial College London and his PhD from the University of Cambridge. During his PhD, he worked at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, where he focused on gaining a quantitative understanding of clonal evolution using statistical analysis of genomic sequences, theoretical modeling of evolutionary dynamics and controlled experiments in laboratory evolution, with applications to the study of cancer and microbial population dynamics. He was the recipient of various awards and grants for his graduate work, including a Wellcome PhD fellowship and a Sanger Early Career Innovation Award. He joined Dr. Shah and Dr. Tavaré’s laboratories in 2018. He is a member of the International Cancer Genome Consortium and the CRUK IMAXT Grand Challenge Team.