Profiles

Paul Boutros, Ph.D., M.B.A., is a cancer data scientist and professor in the departments of human genetics and urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He currently serves as director of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Cancer Data Science program, Associate Director of cancer informatics at the UCLA Institute for Precision Health, and is a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research.

The research in Boutros’ laboratory lies at the intersection of clinical, molecular and imaging data. He focuses on how these diverse pieces of information can be linked to personalize therapy for cancer patients. By applying techniques from modern data science strategies, particularly machine-learning, he creates biomarkers to help ensure therapies are selected that maximize cure and minimize morbidities. His work sometimes centers on specific tumor types, particularly prostate and sarcoma, but often includes others in conjunction to identify general and tumor-type specific features of cancer. Some of his recent studies focus on how cancers develop differently based on the sex, age or ancestric features of the patient.

Boutros has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers, and in his leadership roles as professor in the departments of human genetics and urology, he is currently working to support personalizing therapy for cancer by developing novel statistical methodologies. He leads the ICGC-TCGA DREAM Somatic Mutation Calling Challenge that is setting global standards for analyzing cancer genomic data, and drives programs in cancer genomics, data science and biomarker translation.