Sohrab Shah

Sohrab Shah PhD is Chair of Computational Oncology and Professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and previously led the Shah Laboratory at BC Cancer and University of British Columbia. He is a world leader in applying single-cell sequencing and advanced computational methods to dissect the cellular and molecular complexity of cancer. His laboratory developed SIGNALS, MEDICC2, and other widely used algorithms for inferring copy number evolution from single-cell sequencing data, and produced landmark studies revealing the evolutionary dynamics of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and lymphoma at single-cell resolution. Shah's group was among the first to apply single-cell DNA sequencing at scale to trace the clonal architecture of tumours, demonstrating that cancer evolution follows punctuated rather than gradual modes in many settings. His work integrating single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics, and genomics has revealed how the tumour microenvironment interacts with evolving cancer clones to shape immunosuppression and drug resistance. He developed computational methods for deconvolving tumour composition from bulk RNA-seq data and for integrating multi-modal single-cell data, contributing critical tools adopted widely in the cancer genomics community. Shah has received numerous honours including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Foundation Award and election to the Royal Society of Canada.