Mick Correll

Associate Director, Center for Cancer Computational Biology

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Biography

It took one night of deep contemplation, on a bluff near his Colorado home, for college-bound Correll to decide that he would major in biology. He reasoned there was “really nothing more fascinating, challenging, and mysteriously beautiful” than studying life itself.

Two years into college at the University of California, San Diego, and purely on a whim, Correll discovered that he knew how to program computers. It was instinctive, something he could do almost immediately and with ease. He transferred to the University of Colorado and took a class in bioinformatics led by field pioneer Gary Stormo. For Correll, this proved to be “mind-blowing”; he had found his direction and wound up earning a double degree in computer science and molecular biology.

Correll graduated around the end of the dot-com boom, as the race to sequence the human genome had just taken off. This influenced his decision to put graduate school on hold (he hasn’t made it back yet) and head for a job in industry. He started at LION Bioscience in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eventually switching to the business intelligence company InforSense in 2005. This was a deliberate move; Correll could see genomics expanding into hospitals, and he wanted to “get there first.”

At InforSense he began working on translational research, helping build a clinical data warehouse and genomic analysis pipeline for the Clinical Breast Care Project, a collaboration between Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the Windber Research Institute in Pennsylvania. The end product, called ClinicalSense, a clinical research software application, led to Correll’s introduction to John Quackenbush at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which he subsequently joined to help Quackenbush run the Center for Cancer Computational Biology.

Being part of the LGRC is particularly exciting for Correll because the project is essentially what he’s been preparing for his entire career. “I’ve always tried to focus on the junctions between science and engineering, business and science, industry and academia,” he says. “Maybe I’ve sacrificed depth for breadth this way, but I also think it’s given me a good perspective on how to make things happen.”