Andrew Roth

Dr. Andrew Roth is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, with additional appointments at the BC Cancer Research Centre and BC Cancer Agency's Department of Molecular Oncology. His interdisciplinary work bridges computational science and cancer biology, focusing on developing novel methods to understand tumor evolution and heterogeneity.

Dr. Roth's research centers on applying statistical machine learning to high-dimensional cancer biology, with expertise in probabilistic graphical models, non-parametric Bayesian methods, and computational statistics. His primary focus is developing computational methods for studying clonal population structures and tumor evolution. His work leverages variational and sequential Monte Carlo methods to extract biologically interpretable insights from complex genomic datasets, with significant implications for understanding cancer progression, treatment resistance, and metastasis.

Dr. Roth's publication record demonstrates consistent innovation in computational cancer genomics, particularly in clonal evolution, tumor heterogeneity, and single-cell analysis. His methodological contributions (including PyClone, ReMixT, and TITAN) have advanced our ability to reconstruct evolutionary histories of tumors and identify critical transitions in cancer progression across multiple cancer types including breast, ovarian, and medulloblastoma.

Scientific Recognition

• Publications in high-impact journals including Nature, Nature Methods, Genome Biology, and Genome Research
• Work applied in high-profile studies of breast and ovarian cancer published in Nature and Nature Genetics

Academic Supervision

Dr. Roth actively mentors graduate students across Bioinformatics and Computer Science programs. His lab currently includes PhD student Eric Lee working on 'Computational approaches for exploring the spatial dynamics of the cellular ecosystem,' along with numerous other graduate students and trainees. He has supervised Master's theses on liquid biopsies for cancer monitoring, differential RNA expression analysis using Bayesian phylogenetic modeling, and spatial characterization of tumor microenvironments with spatially aware clustering methods.

Research Environment

Dr. Roth leads a research group at the BC Cancer Research Centre within the Genome Sciences Centre, a high-throughput genome sequencing facility recognized as a leader in genomics and bioinformatics. His lab collaborates extensively with clinicians, molecular biologists, and bioinformatic scientists to develop and apply single-cell multiomic methods for studying cancer evolution, particularly in follicular lymphoma. The lab operates within one of Canada's premier cancer research environments with access to robust computational and sequencing technology facilities.