Roel Verhaak, PhD

Roel Verhaak, Ph.D., is Professor and Associate Director of Computational Biology and the Florine Deschenes Roux Chair for Genomics and Computational Biology at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. 

Dr. Verhaak’s research focuses on brain tumors, primarily leveraging computational analysis of datasets of unprecedented size and complexity. He was involved with, and a co-leader of, the glioma projects of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) while at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and the faculty of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. This work has helped elevate our understanding of this lethal type of brain tumor. He was among the first to recognize the frequency and potential of extrachromosomal DNA amplifications in cancer. He is also a founding member of the Glioma Longitudinal AnalySiS (GLASS) consortium, which was created to accelerate efforts to understand glioma tumor evolution and expose therapeutic vulnerabilities.  Dr. Verhaak is a scientific co-founder of Boundless Bio, a precision oncology biotechnology company interrogating extrachromosomal DNA in cancer biology.

Dr. Verhaak is a recipient of the AAAS Wachtel Award, the Agilent Early Career Professor Award, and the Peter Steck Memorial Award. 

Dr. Verhaak holds a Ph.D. in Medicine from Erasmus University Medical Center, the Netherlands. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Dr. Verhaak earned his M.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.