Instructor in Investigation Cancer Center, Mass General Research Institute

Instructor in Medicine Harvard Medical School

bone metastases; breast neoplasms; drug resistance neoplasm; epithelial to mesenchymal transition; epithelial-mesenchymal transition; gene expression profiling; gene expression regulation neoplastic; metastasis; neoplastic cells circulating; oligonucleotide array sequence analysis; postmenopause; tumor quiescence; tumorigenesis

Dr. Wittner is a Staff Scientist in the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cancer Research and an Instructor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the use of statistical and computational methods in the application of high-throughput assays such as microarrays, RNAi screens and sequencing to the investigation of mechanisms of tumorigenesis, metastasis and treatment resistance such as invasion, epithelial to mesenchymal transition and quiescence.

Dr. Wittner received a PhD in mathematics from Cornell University in 1988. As a post-doctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he performed research on the theory of machine learning. At various companies he then applied machine learning to the analysis of scanned images of documents. He turned his attention to cancer research in 2004 as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Robert Gentleman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Sridhar Ramaswamy at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cancer Research, first as a Research Fellow and later as a Staff Scientist.