Alex Bhatt

Alex Bhatt applies evolutionary biology frameworks to understand cancer development and progression from the earliest somatic mutations to metastasis. His research has characterized clonal dynamics during cancer initiation in normal tissues, revealing that somatic mutations and clonal expansions are common in aging tissues before cancer forms. He has developed phylogenetic approaches to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer from single-cell and bulk sequencing data. His evolutionary cancer biology work informs understanding of the origins of intratumor heterogeneity and implications for treatment resistance.