Sohrab Shah, PhD

Sohrab Shah was appointed to MSK in Apr 2018 as the inaugural Chief of the Computational Oncology Service and is the incumbent of the Nicholls-Biondi Chair. He received his BSc degree in biology from the Queens University in Ontario Canada and his BSc and MSc in computer science from the University of British Columbia. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 2008 and was appointed as a Principal Investigator to The British Columbia Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia in 2010 where he developed the roots of his research program. He is a University of British Columbia Killam laureate and a Susan G. Komen Foundation Scholar. His research focuses on understanding how tumors evolve over time through integrative approaches involving genomics and computational modeling. He has made seminal contributions to understanding the clonal evolution of ovarian cancers and has discovered that specific mutational patterns in the genomes of ovarian cancers are prognostic. Dr. Shah has also pioneered computational methods for identifying mutations in cancer genomes as well as deciphering patterns of cancer evolution. He has led the development of a novel experimental platform for single cell genome analysis as well as novel statistical models, algorithms, and computational approaches to analyze large, high dimensional genomics and transcriptomic data sets, from both patient tumors and model systems. These resources have led to recent progress in molecular profiling of cancer cells at single cell resolution. Dr. Shah has been at the forefront of studying tumor evolution in breast, ovary and lymphoid malignancies. His work has been published in many of the major scholarly journals. In 2018 Dr. Shah was a Highly Cited Researchers with Clarivate Analytics. He is widely regarded as a leader and his appointment has greatly enhanced the reputation of MSK as a leading force in the field of computational oncology.