I wanted to work on something related to game theory. During my sophomore and junior years, I had bounced back and forth between various math concepts, but I always came back to game theory because it can describe interpersonal interactions in mathematical terms, an idea that was very intriguing to me. However, I looked for something beyond game theory’s most common applications, namely in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. While searching for this new application of game theory, I noticed that cells, especially cancer cells, can behave strategically. The development of a malignant tumor requires the emergence of more aggressive subclones of cells. I imagined that during the development of malignancy, there must be some form of competition4 and cooperation5 among the tumor cells. Each individual cell can be a player with a strategy determined by its phenotype. With these thoughts in mind, I began researching the possibility of applying game theory to cancer.

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• Mathematics
• Medicine