Thomas "Ollie" McDonald, PhD, serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Cancer Evolution in the Department of Data Sciences at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Thomas studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and obtained his PhD in Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas under the direction of Professor Marek Kimmel. During his time at Rice, Thomas spent a summer as a PhD student intern in the Modeling and Simulation Group of Novartis Pharma AG in Basel, Switzerland working on nonparametric Bayesian Dose-Response Models for adverse effects. He served as a postdoctoral research fellow in Franziska Michor’s lab before moving to the Center for Cancer Evolution as a Research Associate. His main research interests are in branching processes and mathematical modeling of tumor evolution and heterogeneity in cancers.