Evan Savage

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Memphis, United States

Evan Savage is a Bioinformatics Scientist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital with a unique background in psychology, philosophy, oncology, and neuroscience. Evan is part of the Shelat lab, which is focused on identifying and exploiting weaknesses in multiple types of cancers and tumors. The Shelat Lab is particularly interested in targeting the DNA damage response (DDR) in pediatric cancers and uses chemical biology and machine learning to understand how to identify and target these weaknesses. Finding these vulnerabilities will ultimately lead to guide therapies with existing drugs or lead to new drug targets. To this end, Evan's research is focused on the collaborative development of strategies to identify and validate targetable DDR deficiencies, developing bioinformatic pipelines to assess genomic scars, and interrogating genomic scar features indicative of DDR-deficiency within pediatric tumors. In addition to his main research goals, Evan is interested in researching mutli-omics data integration approaches and believes leveraging these approaches can augment precision oncology. Evan is a motivated collaborator within the City of Memphis: Evan routinely presents his research at St. Jude events, works with his alma maters (University of Memphis and Rhodes College) to recruit up-and-coming students for opportunities at St. Jude, and participates in various fundraising events for St. Jude. Evan encourages anyone inspired by his work to reach out for collaboration opportunities. Outside of research, Evan thrives in exploring the outdoors, taking trips to the Ozark mountains, visiting his family in the Asheville metropolitan area, attempting to improve his deplorable handicap in golf, and biking from Midtown Memphis to Shelby Farms to fish or play disc golf.