Francisco Sanchez-Vega is an Assistant Attending Computational Oncologist in the Colorectal Cancer Service of the Department of Surgery, and is affiliated with Computational Oncology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. His research focuses on translational applications of machine learning, statistical modeling and computational methods to the field of cancer genomics and precision oncology. Dr. Sanchez-Vega’s doctoral research work addressed the challenge of learning graphical models to efficiently describe high-dimensional, multivariate probability distributions within the context of small-sample regimes. During his postdoctoral experience at the National Human Genome Research Institute, he investigated patterns of aberrant DNA methylation in cancer and identified novel epigenetic biomarkers that could be used for early detection through non-invasive screening tests. Since his arrival at MSK in 2015, he has worked in a wide variety of translational genomic projects. Notable examples include the analysis of molecular determinants of response to anti-HER2 targeted therapies in patients with ERBB2 positive esophagogastric adenocarcinomas, understanding the interplay between mutational burden and response to immune checkpoint inhibitors in lung adenocarcinoma and characterizing the genomic bases of organ-specific metastasis. Dr. Sanchez-Vega was also actively involved and played leadership roles in several of the final marker papers from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the TCGA Pan-Cancer Atlas initiative, where he was one of the driving forces behind the flagship study that characterized somatic alterations in 10 canonical oncogenic signaling pathways in 9,125 tumors from 33 different cancer types.