Team

We are located at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, in the Department of Evolutionary Theory, where we focus our research efforts on ecological complexity, evolutionary dynamics and immune-interactions in cancer and the hematopoietic system. We apply nonlinear dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and statistics to integrate models with data and make clinically relevant predictions.

Students

Qianci Yang (graduate student)

Bachelor and master (integrated master) degree from the University of Warwick, UK (2022). Research interest in mathematical and statistical modelling of cancer and immune system interactions, evolutionary game dynamics and related areas, history of science.

Álvaro Martinez Rubio (visiting PhD student)

BSc in Physics (Universidad de Córdoba, 2017). MSc in Applied Mathematics (Imperial College London, 2018). Currently holding a Research Fellowship from Fundación Pablo Ugarte at Cádiz University. Álvaro’s resaerch activity focuses on the development of mathematical models and machine learning for predictive modeling and therapy optimisation in childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) treatment, particularly cellular therapy.

Collaborators

Our highly interdisciplinary work combines resaerch approaches and methods from biomathematics, computational biology, statistics, hematology, oncology, pathology, immunology, ecology of cancer, and evolution.

At the University of Kiel, we work with the teams of Claudia Baldus and Monika Brüggemann on heterogeneity and predicitve modeling of leukemia and lymphoma, as well as with Susanne Sebens on tumor heterogeneity and metastasis.

Togther with the group of Frederick L. Locke and Friedrich Stölzel we work on better understanding cellular and drug kinetics during CAR T cell therapy.

With the groups of Andriy Marusyk and David Basanta we work on tumor-stroma interacitons, tumor ecology, and the effects of cancer associated fibroblasts in lung and breast cancers.

With Eric Padron and his lab we work on inflammatory interactions in chronic myeloid diseases, such as CMML.

With the teams of Meghan Ferrall-Fairbanks and Brandon Manley we work on mulitple projects that seek to quantify the immunological and geospatial heterogeneity of cancer.

Together with Christian Brendel we model the cellular kinetics after gene therapy intervention for sickle cell disease.