Welcome!

These are my personal pages. My name is Philipp Altrock, I am a Project Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. In April 2025, I will start as the Heisenberg Group for Cancer Modeling and Evolition at the Department of Hematology/Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Kiel University.

We investigate how the ecology of tumors can be quantified in order to better understand the role of selection on cancer, stroma, and immune cell populations during tumor evolution and progression. In this context, our work focuses on quantification of tumor phenotypic and immunologic heterogeneity, on immune system interactions during cellular immunotherapy, and on nonlinear models of selection in cancer systems.

Brief bio: Dr Altrock’s research focuses on cancer evolutionary dynamics and cancer systems immunology. From 2017-21, he was a group leader at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. He did postdoctoral work at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts with Franziska Michor (2013-17), obtained his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) from Kiel University (2011), and received his degree in physics from Leipzig University (2007). In 2013, Dr Altrock was awarded a Leopoldina fellowship for his work at Harvard, and in 2021 he received the Moffitt Cancer Center 2020 Junior Faculty Research Award. Dr. Altrock has obtained multiple grants for his independent research, and has successfully supervised and mentored students, graduate students, and postdocs. Starting 2025, Philipp Altrock will be a Heisenberg Professor for Cancer Modeling and Evoliution at Kiel University, where his group investigates causes and consequences of cancer evolution applying and further developing methods from statistics, data science, theoretical physics, and mathematical biology.