MathOnco

Currently, I am staying three months as a visiting postdoc in Oslo, Norway working closely together with Alvaro Köhn-Luque and Leonard Schmiester on mechanistic learning, that is the combination of mechanistic modeling and machine learning.

My group leader Vincent Heuveline and myself have been interviewed from the Klaus Tschira Foundation about our research project Mathematics in Oncology.

On April 19, I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis titled Mathematical modeling of Lynch syndrome carcinogenesis. There are no words needed except THANK YOU to all the people who supported me along this way!🎓

I am proud to be part of a new international collaborative initiative, called INDICATE, to unravel the role of the Human Leukocyte Antigen type as a cancer risk modifier in individuals with Lynch syndrome.

As part of the EKFZ Lecture Series "Focus on AI", I was invited by Prof. Dr. med. Jakob Kather to give a talk on Why the combination of modeling and machine learning could be the future direction in mathematical oncology at the EKFZ Digital Health in Dresden, Germany. In my opinion, the synergie between mathematical modeling and machine learning should be a future research direction and could bring MathOnco to the next level. Stay tuned for future steps we aim at achieving in this direction.

As part of the MathOnco team, I have created a new feature for the official MathOnco community website: MathOnco research group highlights. In this section of the website, we provide a world-wide overview of MathOnco research groups, that can be searched by keywords and geographic location.

As announced in my last post, I joined the MathOnco team as an associate editor for the official MathOnco community website. We have asked the MathOnco community to fill out our survey on the MathOnco weekly newsletter and the website to see what MathOnco folks are most interested in. Now, I've written an interim report for the MathOnco blog on the survey results with some demographics of our community and future directions for the community resources!

I am really looking forward to working together with the MathOnco team on the official MathOnco website. Thank you for the very warm welcome! As a first step, we have prepared a survey on the MathOnco weekly newsletter and the website to see what MathOnco folks are most interested in. Fill it out and be part of shaping the future of the MathOnco community!

Aysel Ahadova and myself, we have written a blog post on the official MathOnco blog to describe the importance of mathematical oncology in studying inherited colorectal cancer. We focus on the most common inherited colorectal cancer syndrome, Lynch syndrome, and give insights into our research projects here in Heidelberg, Germany.

Our collaborative initiative in Heidelberg which started with my PhD in 2017 now became an official 3-year research project funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. The aim of the collaborative project Mathematics in Oncology is to understand tumor initiation, evolution, and immunology by means of mathematical modeling and thereby find approaches to potentially prevent hereditary cancer in the future.