I am an applied mathematician studying the timing and effect of mutations during cancer evolution. I want to figure out what happens to push benign tumours over the line to become malignant (cancerous). It is very difficult to figure out when this happens – usually we only have a late snapshot of cancer. I am taking a “bottom-up” approach using mathematical models of the underlying mechanisms, and focussing on pre-cancerous conditions and benign tumours so we can build a “before” and “after” picture. Two very important types of damage are copy number alterations and chromosomal aberrations – large chunks of the genome can be messed up at once. I am studying applications of machine learning and branching process theory to copy number alterations and genomic data.