Dr. Robert Gatenby, MD.

Dr. Gatenby is the Department Chair of Radiology and co-director of Cancer Biology and Evolution Program at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

Dr. Gatenby spearheaded the formation of a new program at Moffitt titled Integrative Mathematical Oncology (IMO). The IMO brings to the Cancer Center a cadre of applied mathematicians to collaborate with tumor biologists and clinical oncologists. The goal is to use the mathematics developed for other nonlinear dynamical systems to examine the physiology of a tumor incorporating factors such as phenotypic evolution, intracellular communication pathways and interactions with microenvironmental factors including therapies. The program fosters continuous interaction between mathematicians and experimentalists as they form explicit comprehensive theoretical models to serve as a framework for understanding cancer’s development, progression and treatment. The IMO, led by Dr. Gatenby, represents an experiment in rethinking paradigms in medical research. A key purpose of the IMO is to provide the quantitative methods that will allow experimentalists and clinicians to frame their hypotheses, simulate their experimental design in-silico, and identify first principles that govern cancer growth and treatment.

Dr. Gatenby aims to make progress using methods that have been successful in the physical sciences for centuries —through an iterative partnership between mathematically-oriented theoreticians, biologists and clinical physicians.