Chris Sander
Chris Sander started his career as a theoretical physicist and then switched to theoretical biology, in part inspired by the first completely sequenced genome. He founded two departments of computational biology – at the EMBL in Heidelberg and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York – and co-founded the research branch of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge and a biotech startup with Millennium in Boston. Chris joined the Harvard community in 2016 as faculty in Cell Biology and then Systems Biology. Special Advisor for Quantitative Biology to the Ludwig Center at Harvard, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute. He is creating new connections between scientists at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School, including building translational collaborative bridges for scientists using quantitative sciences to solve biological problems.
With his group and collaborators, Chris aims to beat drug resistance in cancer using systems biology methods to develop combination therapies. They are also developing the next generation cBioPortal for cancer research and therapy, obtaining biomolecular structures and functional interactions on a large scale using evolutionary information, and adapting machine learning methods to mine millions of genomes. He is collaborating with groups in Denmark and the US to apply AI to longitudinal health records to identify patients at high risk for pancreatic and ovarian cancer and collaborates with clinicians in the design of effective affordable surveillance program aiming at the early detection of cancer.