Simona Cristea is the Head of Genomics Data Science and AI at the Hale Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Group Leader in the Data Science Department at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Senior Research Scientist at Harvard School of Public Health. Simona’s interdisciplinary data science group is working on connecting AI-driven data analysis with mechanistic evolutionary modeling. Simona is particularly interested in Large Language Models applied to single cell data with the goal of understanding and simulating tumor progression and identifying novel ways to prevent tumors from initiating.