Welcome!

Welcome to my personal website. My name is Philipp Altrock, I am a Heisenberg-Professor and lead the Heisenberg Group for Cancer Modeling and Evolution at the Department of Hematology/Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Kiel University.

We investigate how the ecology of tumors can be quantified 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 the 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. He is the Heisenberg Professor for Cancer Modeling and Evolution at Kiel University. His research group investigates cancer and related diseases using methods from statistics, data science, theoretical physics, and mathematical biology. Philipp Altrock also works as a consultant for the bio-medical industry and was a project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology from 2021 to 2025. From 2017 to 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.