Sebastian M. Waszak

Biography

Sebastian M. Waszak is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an Associate Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuro-Oncology at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. He obtained his PhD in Bioengineering and Biotechnology from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and specialized as a postdoctoral fellow in cancer genomics at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. His research focuses on biomedical data science for children and young adults with brain tumours. He studies the spatio-temporal evolution of childhood brain tumours and develops computational methods to diagnose and monitor patient responses to therapy. He published 80 papers in basic science and medical journals (h-index 40; >11,000 citations), with first/senior author publications in Science (2013), Cell (2015), The Lancet Oncology (2018), Nature (2020a, 2020b), Clinical Cancer Research (2021), and the Journal of Clinical Oncology (2020, 2023). He contributed and introduced novel entities to the 2021 WHO Classification of CNS Tumors and the 2023 WHO Classification of Genetic Tumor Syndromes. His research resulted in revising clinical practice guidelines and amendments to clinical trial protocols. He is a member of the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, the Pediatric DMG Tumor Board at UCSF, and the DIPG/DMG National Brain Tumor Board.