Dr Adrian Baez-Ortega

Adrian Baez-Ortega is a computational biologist interested in understanding how transmissible cancers emerge, evolve and spread in different groups of animals, particularly marine bivalves. He leads the Bivalve Transmissible Neoplasia Group at the Departments of Zoology and Genetics, with research funding from the Royal Society and the European Research Council.

Adrian studied undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Computer Science at the University of La Laguna (Spain) before completing a PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis, which investigated the evolution of a transmissible cancer in dogs, received honours including the Harold M Weintraub Graduate Student Award and the Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists.

In 2020, Adrian joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, contributing to multiple studies of somatic evolution in human and non-human animal tissues. During this time, he was also elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he is now a Senior Research Fellow.

Adrian’s recent work includes the co-direction of the first genomic study of transmissible cancers in marine cockles. This work, which was spearheaded by researchers at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and involved collection of diseased specimens across 11 countries, was featured on the cover of Nature Cancer (Nov 2023) and attracted coverage from outlets including The New York Times, The New York Post and El País.

In addition to his research, Adrian has designed and delivered scientific programming workshops for early-career researchers, developed statistical models which have been adopted in multiple fields, and contributed to scientific dissemination through general-audience articles and talks over the last decade.

Research interests

• Transmissible cancer
• Somatic evolution
• Cancer genome evolution
• Comparative genomics
• Bioinformatics

Publications

See Adrian’s Google Scholar profile.