Question: What types of cancer do you research and how does your work help?

Fiona Macfarlane answered on 5 Mar 2018:

I look at a lot of different cancers, at the moment though the data I use is from head and neck cancers, but the things we look at in those types of cancers, can be found in lots of different ones.

What I do is I input information about the cancer into a computer model I have developed to predict how it will grow over time. We can also include treatments into the model to see what they will do to the cancer, and whether they will help to remove it. We are still checking the model works, so don’t use it for real life patients.

Although similar models are used in cancer research hospitals in America, where the amount or type of treatment a patient should get is predicted by the computer and mathematicians then pass this on to the doctors, who try the treatment.