Simona Cristea, PhD Joins Data Science Faculty

The Department of Data Science is delighted to announce the faculty promotion of Simona Cristea, PhD. 

Dr. Cristea’s research focuses on developing computational and mathematical models to understand the evolutionary forces driving cancer initiation, progression and invasion. Her particular interest is to connect deep learning frameworks with mechanistic descriptions of tumor evolution and immune system involvement. Dr. Cristea joined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2016 as Postdoctoral Fellow in Franziska Michor’s lab. Since 2020, she has served as Harvard Medical School Faculty with an appointment as Instructor in Medicine.

Currently, Dr. Cristea is Head of Data Science at the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. She is leading a team of data scientists and mathematical modelers to develop algorithms and data analysis frameworks to model tumor progression by combining evolutionary thinking with statistical methods and deep learning.

Dr. Cristea holds Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Cybernetics from the University of Bucharest and the Academy for Economic Studies in Romania, a Master’s in Computational Biology and a PhD in Computational Cancer Genomics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Throughout her career, Dr. Cristea has received multiple awards and fellowships, including the ETH Excellence Scholarship, several Swiss National Science Foundation fellowships, and the Helen Gurley Women in Science Award.