Christina Curtis

Early life and education Curtis decided that she wanted to work on cancer treatments when she was a teenager. She was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles studying cellular and molecular biology and did a masters degree at Heidelberg University. She moved to the University of Southern California for graduate studies, where she earned both a master's and a doctoral degree. She completed her PhD in molecular and computational biology in 2007 supervised by Simon Tavaré.

Research and career Curtis was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, where she spent three years before returning to the faculty at the University of Southern California.

Curtis has leveraged computational modeling to better understand breast cancer, providing insight into the evolution and metastasization of tumors. She established the Cancer Computational and Systems Biology group.

Curtis uses computer simulations to understand genetic mutations in tumor samples. She believes that breast cancer tumors have genetic differences that respond differently to treatments. To this end, Curtis believes that tumors with metastatic potential have this from the start – they are "born to be bad". 2016 Kavli Foundation Frontiers of Science Fellow 2018 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award 2022 American Association for Cancer Research Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic Science 2025 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research

Selected publications