STAFF

Franziska Michor, PhD is the Charles A. Dana Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Computational Biology and of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Michor obtained her undergraduate training in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Vienna, Austria, and her PhD from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Afterwards, she was awarded a fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows. From 2007 until 2010, she was an Assistant Professor in the Computational Biology Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Michor is the director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Evolution. She has been the recipient of the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Alice Hamilton Award, the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, the 36th Annual AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research, and others. Dr. Michor’s laboratory investigates the evolutionary dynamics of cancer initiation, progression, response to therapy, and emergence of resistance.
Thomas “Ollie” McDonald, PhD, serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Cancer Evolution in the Department of Data Sciences at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Thomas studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and obtained his PhD in Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas under the direction of Professor Marek Kimmel. During his time at Rice, Thomas spent a summer as a PhD student intern in the Modeling and Simulation Group of Novartis Pharma AG in Basel, Switzerland working on nonparametric Bayesian Dose-Response Models for adverse effects. He served as a postdoctoral research fellow in Franziska Michor’s lab before moving to the Center for Cancer Evolution as a Research Associate. His main research interests are in branching processes and mathematical modeling of tumor evolution and heterogeneity in cancers.

Michael Kramer will be working closely with Thomas McDonald on single-cell DNA sequencing of tumors from colorectal, ovarian, breast cancers. He will be developing a reproducible pipeline to generate BAM files, call variants and copy numbers, as well as creating phylogenetic trees that could be a template for future projects and samples.

Christina Noonan is a Program Administrator II to Franziska Michor and Sahand Hormoz in the Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She plays an important role in supporting Franziska Michor, her lab, and the Center for Cancer Evolution (CCE), handling key administrative and day-to-day operations. Before joining the Data Science team, she spent six years in Medical Oncology as a Scheduling Team Leader, where she built strong organizational and leadership skills while managing busy clinical schedules.

Andriana Patmanidis is a Research Technician working between the Polyak Laboratory in the Medical Oncology Department and the Michor Laboratory in the Data Science Department. Andriana studied Biology and minored in Medical Humanities at Boston College. During her undergraduate career, Andriana researched cellular agriculture and tissue engineering under the supervision of Dr. Glenn Gaudette, a department chair and Professor at Boston College. Andriana is currently interested in breast cancer drug therapy and learning more about computational biology.