Institute for Data Science in Oncology Announces New Focus-Area Lead for Advancing Data Science to Reduce Public Cancer Burden

The Institute for Data Science in Oncology (IDSO) at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center today announced the appointment of Iakovos Toumazis, Ph.D., to lead its focused efforts in advancing decision analytics for health.

The goal of this new IDSO focus area is to develop, rigorously validate and implement advanced data‑driven analytics frameworks that support optimal decision‑making to enhance patient outcomes, to strengthen value‑based care delivery, and to enable efficient allocation of health care resources.

“As the inaugural IDSO focus-area leader for decision analytics for health, Dr. Toumazis will bring data science approaches to inform local, national and global health policy,” said IDSO co-director David Jaffray, Ph.D., senior vice president and chief technology and digital officer at MD Anderson. “Data science approaches and techniques hold the promise of helping individuals and societies make better decisions as they work to reduce the burden of cancer.”

Toumazis works at the intersection of data science, operations research and cancer prevention, where he has helped pioneer personalized risk-based approaches to early lung cancer detection. His research informed the 2021 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation on lung cancer screening, helping to shift focus away from a one-size-fits-all approach toward more data-driven approaches that affordably maximize impact, enabling greater reach into the population without adding cost.

An assistant professor of Health Services Research, Toumazis previously was named an IDSO affiliate. He has helped coordinate efforts with multiple outside agencies to further the goals of IDSO to use data to help patients, providers and government agencies make better decisions about care. As an IDSO affiliate, Toumazis also extended IDSO collaborations with the U.S. Department of Energy by participating in a 2024 workshop that explored approaches for tackling challenges in integrating the growing streams of data critical for informing complex cancer policy decisions. This includes leveraging the largest publicly available scientific computing resources to drive innovations in the ecosystem supporting complex decisions in health.

Iakovos joined MD Anderson in 2020 after a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stanford. He is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) lung cancer consortium where he is a champion for team data science, collaborating with other leading scientists around the world to develop simulation models that inform national screening and cancer control policies.

Iakovos brings key leadership to the IDSO focus area of decision analytics for health, joining established focus areas in quantitative pathology and medical imaging; single cell and spatial omics; safety, quality and access; and computational modeling for precision medicine.