Dr. LaBar [Candy and William Raveis Fellow] is using budding yeast and computational modeling to study the basic processes that determine how cancer cell populations evolve in response their environment. Dr. LaBar aims to understand how the number of cells in a tumor may drive the evolution of cancer cells based on their supply of new mutations. His research has the potential to shed light on specific mutations that appear in certain cancers, alterations that allow cancer cell populations to grow abnormally, and strategies that will help predict the evolution of cancer cell populations and patient prognosis.