PhD student harnessing computational tools to make a difference for cancer patients.

Tom Ouellette wouldn’t have predicted that he’d pursue cancer research.

However, he had an interest in computational tools and wondered how they could be harnessed to study biological questions, which led him to undertake a PhD in Computational Biology at the University of Toronto. It wasn’t until he rotated into Dr. Philip Awadalla’s lab at OICR that Ouellette became passionate about studying cancer.

Now, he’s using that passion to build computational tools to predict how cancer progresses – tools that hopefully one day make a difference for cancer patients.

“I was confronted with this sobering fact that almost everyone will know someone that has cancer,” Ouellette says. “This turned my pure biological interest in cancer research to something where I want to build tools that matter for a patient’s journey.”

Find out more in Ouellette’s The Next Generation video.