Pablo Tamayo, PhD

Pablo Tamayo is a cancer researcher and computational scientist, professor in the Division of Genomics and Precision Medicine, and head of the Computational Cancer Analysis Laboratory (CCAL) at the Moores Cancer Center and the Center for Novel Therapeutics. Dr. Tamayo earned a Ph.D. in Statistical Physics from Boston University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University, Thinking Machines Corp., and Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he developed advanced high-performance computing simulation algorithms. He was a senior researcher and chief scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation, a technology company that developed supercomputers and predictive analytics software and was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 1999. Dr. Tamayo became a consultant to the Oracle Data Mining Technologies group and participated in developing predictive algorithms for the Oracle database. Over the last 25 years, at the Whitehead and Broad Institutes in Cambridge MA, Dr. Tamayo has worked in the development of genomics and computational biology methodologies and analytical approaches for cancer research, the study of functional taxonomies for cancer classification, oncogenic pathways, disease subtypes, target discovery and paradigms for precision medicine. He is one of the original co-authors of many cancer genomic analysis methods including Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) which has over 400,000 users worldwide and has been cited in over 33,000 papers. Over the last few years, Dr. Tamayo and his collaborators have developed a general framework to systematically define and characterize oncogenic cell and tumor states to infer optimal combinations of therapeutic agents as part of a general precision oncology paradigm. Dr. Tamayo has co-authored over 200 publications that have been the subject of over 130,000 citations and he is co-inventor of 10 U.S. patents.