Kerstin Haase

Dr Kerstin Haase is a computational biologist who utilises multimodal computational approaches to unravel the fundamental dynamics of human disease. Her research is driven by a desire to decode the biological mechanisms governing tumour evolution and metastatic progression within large-scale patient cohorts. 

Kerstin earned her PhD from the Technical University of Munich, where she investigated the evolutionary biology of viruses through next-generation sequencing. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Francis Crick Institute in London, she applied genomics to map clonal heterogeneity and evolutionary histories across nearly 3,000 tumour genomes as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium. Later, at Charité Berlin, she developed targeted computational tools to resolve the biological structures of extrachromosomal circular DNA and understand how focal oncogene amplifications drive paediatric malignancies. 

Now based in the Cancer Metastasis Laboratory at University College London, Kerstin’s work focuses on deciphering the temporal and spatial biological processes of metastatic seeding across diverse organ sites, ultimately seeking to uncover targetable mechanisms in terminal disease progression.