Marc J. Williams
I'm a computational biologist interested in somatic evolution, the process by which the cells in our bodies change and accumulate mutations over our lifetimes. This process underlies cancer, but it's also happening in healthy tissues all the time. My work combines mathematics and genomics to understand this evolutionary process, with the goal of improving how we track and treat cancer.
I'm currently a research scientist in Sohrab Shah's lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Before that, I completed my PhD with Trevor Graham at Barts Cancer Institute in London.
In January 2027, I will be starting a research group at Bangor University supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
Elsewhere
- CV (PDF)
- Software on GitHub
- Email (requires JavaScript)
- Bluesky
- X
Selected papers
- 2025 Tracking clonal evolution during treatment in ovarian cancer using cell-free DNANature
- 2024 Luminal breast epithelial cells of BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation carriers and noncarriers harbor common breast cancer copy number alterationsNature Genetics
- 2022 Single-cell genomic variation induced by mutational processes in cancerNature
- 2020 Measuring the distribution of fitness effects in somatic evolution by combining clonal dynamics with dN/dS ratioseLife
- 2019 Measuring clonal evolution in cancer with genomicsAnnual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics
- 2018 Quantification of subclonal selection in cancer from bulk sequencing dataNature Genetics
- 2016 Identification of neutral tumor evolution across cancer typesNature Genetics
For a full list see Google Scholar