Rate My Professor Benjamin Werner

Dr Benjamin Werner is Reader in Somatic Evolution and Group Leader at the Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London. He holds a Diploma in Physics from the University of Leipzig (2010) and a PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (2013), where he worked under Arne Traulsen on mathematical models of cell population dynamics. Following his doctorate, he completed a postdoctoral position at the same institute focusing on hematopoietic stem cell dynamics and telomere shortening during ageing. In 2015, he joined the Institute of Cancer Research as the first postdoctoral researcher in the Cancer Evolutionary Genomics and Modelling Group led by Andrea Sottoriva, contributing to research combining evolutionary theory with cancer genomic data. In October 2019, he established his independent research group at the Barts Cancer Institute within the Centre for Cancer Evolution and Computational Biology.

His research integrates mathematics, computer simulations and genomic data to quantify somatic evolutionary processes in cancer, including the evolutionary dynamics of extrachromosomal DNA, neutral tumour evolution, resistance to treatment and measures of genetic diversification in somatic tissues. Key publications include “The evolutionary dynamics of extrachromosomal DNA in human cancers” (Nature Genetics, 2022), “Identification of neutral tumor evolution across cancer types” (Nature Genetics, 2016), “Measuring single cell divisions in human cancers from multi-region sequencing data” (Nature Communications, 2020) and “Longitudinal Liquid Biopsy and Mathematical Modeling of Clonal Evolution Forecast Time to Treatment Failure in the PROSPECT-C Phase II Colorectal Cancer Clinical Trial” (Cancer Discovery, 2018). He has received major funding including a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2022–2026), participation in the Cancer Grand Challenges Team eDyNAmiC (2022) and grants from the Human Frontier Science Program and the European Research Council. He is a member of the Society for Mathematical Biology and has served as Guest Editor for PLOS Computational Biology.