Rob Noble

@robjohnnoble

Senior Lecturer (≡ assoc. prof.) in applied maths @citystgeorges.bsky.social, investigating the evolution and ecology of cancer. Dad of two small kids. Associate Editor @jevbio.bsky.social. Competitive V45 distance runner. Work: London. Home: Brighton.

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Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· 16d

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Jun 4

I saw this just two weeks ago. The room contains a lot of gold jewellery but this piece absolutely steals the show. Fantastic museum. Here's a blurry photo of a less glamorous insect, among the tiniest things on show.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Jun 2

Understandable given how thorough the post is! It's near the end.

"Another potential explanation for these impossible results is that the experiments actually were performed with a p16-INK4a specific antibody, but at the moment of writing the paper, a p16-ARC antibody code was retrieved from Abcam or Santa Cruz’s website and inserted into the methods section erroneously. This second explanation might seem more charitable in some sense, but I’m not sure it is… are we to believe that antibody codes in papers are selected at random by a lab tech based on the first search result? For papers to be meaningful the methods have to describe what was actually done and the results have to show what was observed."

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 26

Four current special issues and calls for papers related to cancer evolution/ecology and mathematical oncology (details also in the alt text for you to copy and search)

Cancer in an evolutionary framework: across species and within individualsJournal of Evolutionary Biology
Editors: B Ujvari, A Marusyk, A Nedelcu & N Raven
Deadline: 31st August 2026

Mechanistic and data-driven modeling in mathematical oncologynpj Systems Biology and Applications
Editors: J West, S Hamis, G Lorenzo & R Noble
Deadline: 2nd December 2026

Evolutionary MedicineEvolutionary Applications
Editors: F Thomas, A Dujon, J-P Capp & K Asselin
Deadline: 30th June 2026

Exploring Eco-Evo Applications in Cancer
Evolution, Medicine and Public Health
Editors: B Vibishan, N Johnson & J Somarelli
Deadline: 30th June 2026

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 25

Having just finished @adamjkucharski.bsky.social's "Proof", I found myself at last week's conference referencing the book wrt the ladder of causation; why RCTs aren't always best; communicating uncertainty; and what constitutes proof. Ended up telling everyone just to buy and read it themselves.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 25

What a wonderful Cretan ISEEC Conference that was! Four days bouncing around ideas about evolution, ecology, cancer, translational tech, the future of AI, and much more. See you again in two years!

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 25

Lacking time for yesterday's post-conference excursion (which also sounded fantastic) I spent the afternoon at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which is packed with phenomenal, ridiculously ancient artworks, many inspired by the natural world. A great end to a great few days of science and fun.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 24

First up this morning: ISEEC President @athenaaktipis.bsky.social on cancer-like phenomena in AI. Her substack is athenaaktipis.substack.com

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 23

ISEEC keynote speaker Viktor Müller discusses his research on the threats of evolvsble AI and lessons from evolution in cancer

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 22

Great to have @srishtipatil.bsky.social presenting her new research on early-onset tumours, here at ISEEC 2026. Tomorrow I'll be talking about her previous work with me

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 22

Restoration Oncology as a translation of Restoration Ecology - Janay Fox speaking now at ISEEC 2026. Implies redefining therapeutic success as control, not necessarily cure

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 22

Jill Gallaher's plenary kicks off day two of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer in Crete. Lovely venue for it

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 20

Darwin knew it

"Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of the hive-bee, can be explained by natural selection having taken advantage of numerous, successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts; natural selection having by slow degrees, more and more perfectly, led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from each other in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection. The bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other, than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates. The motive power of the process of natural selection having been economy of wax; that individual swarm which wasted least honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and having transmitted by inheritance its newly acquired economical instinct to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence." Darwin's Origin, Chapter VII

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· May 2

Happy birthday @michaelrosenyes.bsky.social from everyone at Brighton Children's Parade! Float made by Eastbrook Primary Academy.

Float based on Chocolate Cake poem by Michael Rosen

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Mar 5

Each week the MathOnco Newsletter features an artwork linked to a recent paper. My contribution slides Figure 1 of rdcu.be/e62W2 onto the ice of a curling sheet. You can read more and subscribe to this excellent newsletter at thisweekmathonco.substack.com/p/this-week-....

Illustration of the macroscopic model we analyse in our paper, showing the two possible fates of the first surviving mutant within the wildtype population, superimposed on the house of a curling sheet.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Feb 27

Same pattern in the website search bar. I guess the main branding challenge is to avoid confusion with the other UCL. So it's weird that they went with purple.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Feb 8

I just returned the proof of our paper "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations". Google's AI Overview is already reporting the main results (presumably scraped from the November 2023 preprint) as established fact.

$Google's AI Overview says, "Selective sweep probabilities in spatially expanding populations, such as in growing tumours or biological invasions, are generally independent of the mutation rate and determined by the ratio of mutant-to-wildtype radial expansion speeds, with the probability approximated by $(1-c_{wt}/c_{m})^{d}$ (where $d$ is the spatial dimension)." These are new results that we reported for the first time in our preprint.$

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Feb 1

All advice has been very sensible and conventional. It's helping me prioritise and avoid being overly ambitious. E.g. yesterday I ran a parkrun aiming to beat a target time and missed by a few seconds. ChatGPT put this in context of my more important marathon goal.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Jan 15

In 2017 I created the ggmuller R pacakge to draw "Muller plots" combining phylogeny and frequency dynamics. The latest version 0.7.0 fixes deprecated dependencies and includes a few other minor improvements. CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... Vignette: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

A Muller plot generated by ggmuller. The horizontal axis is time, and shapes of different colours represent genotypes (or other subtypes), with height corresponding to genotype frequency (or relative abundance) at the corresponding time point. Descendant genotypes are shown emerging from inside their parents. In this example, colour represents relative fitness.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Dec 25

Got me some top quality presents by @matthewcobb.bsky.social and dodosocks.com/en

Matthew Cobb's biography of Crick is one of the best reviewed books of the year. Dodo Socks makes great slippers and socks and aid the Ukrainian war effort.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Dec 21

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Dec 12

I'll be impressed when AI can tell me which naan is which

Three packets containing Indian breads: one peshwari, one cheese, one vegetable. The squiggles leave me naan the wiser.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Nov 28

Left panel shows a plate with a slab of feta captioned "Un feta complet". Right panel a plate with only crumbs: "Un feta complit".

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Nov 25

To our surprise, our tree balance index was able to predict disease-free survival in the TRACERx cohort, even after controlling for cancer stage. The index is especially useful for stratifying patients in stage 2. The association is robust to various changes of the data and the method. 4/n

Figure 5: Survival curves showing the difference in DFS for tumours based on their phylogenetic tree balance, 1JN , when split by stage where, a) stage 1, b) stage 2 and c) stage 3.

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Nov 19

Save the date! On behalf of the Society, I’m delighted to announce that the next International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer conference will be taking place in Hersonissos, Crete, on May 21-24, 2026. Abstract submissions will open soon. More details: www.evocancer.com

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Nov 16

Only two weeks left of my three-month stay in France. I'm going to miss a lot of things, not least my weekend long runs in the beautiful countryside north of Montpellier.

A view over vineyards towards Pic Saint-Loup, from my run yesterday morning

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Oct 31

In her #MathOnco25 plenary, Sarah Brüningk motivates mechanistic learning in mathematical oncology, drawing on her recent review paper: www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Oct 30

Bob Gatenby finishes his phenomenal #MathOnco25 talk with this stunning figure and conclusion: "Cycles within cycles may allow metastatic prostate cancer to be converted to a chronic disease". The results are from a new paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Oct 30

Joel Brown at #MathOnco25 draws parallels between the evolution and ecology of cancer and of dogs, elephant shrews and (of course) squirrels. Cancer redefined as "a disease of uncontrolled proliferation by transformed cells subject to evolution by natural selection". aacrjournals.org/mcr/article/...

Rob Noble@robjohnnoble· Oct 30

Now @kitcgallagher.bsky.social at #MathOnco25 presents his recent research on predicting treatment outcomes to identify which patients will benefit the most from adaptive therapy. Preprints and papers at scholar.google.com/citations?us...