Luis Cisneros Email & Phone Number

My overall research interest is studying the mechanisms of emergence of collective behavior in complex systems, taken from different angles going from theoretical, to computational to data-driven approaches. I was originally formed as a theoretical physicist that moved into topics of nonlinear dynamics, information theory, and complexity. My doctorate research was on bio-fluid dynamics and collective phenomena of swimming bacteria. My postdoctoral research focused on different aspects of biological organization by taking a systems-biology perspective of the evolution of multicellularity. In particular, my work focused in looking at cancer as a breakdown of the multicellular structure. As a member of Dr. Paul Davies’ team in the ASU-PSOC program, I developed a model of metastasis revealing that early stages of organ invasion could be driven by rare event dynamics rather than selective advantage of the invasive tumor cells. I also did extensive data-driven studies in collaboration with biologist Kimberly Bussey at ASU. In these studies, we correlated gene evolutionary ages with patterns of mutations and expression changes in cancer, demonstrating that ancient genes tend to be robust and that their genomic modifications are associated to advanced stages in cancer. My collaboration with Dr. Bussey yielded a collection of bioinformatics methodologies that revealed that the mutational patterns observed in whole-genome sequencing of cancer samples are a signature of stress- induced mutagenesis, and thus related to ancestral (pre-metazoan) biological mechanisms of evolvability and diversification.Additionally I have participated in a diverse set of other lines of research, most notably modeling of urban dynamics in collaboration with anthropologist Thomas Park from the University of Arizona, and development of bioinformatic measures of RNAseq transcript integrity and co-expression patterns of genomic elements while working in NantOmics.My current research goals as part of Arizona Cancer Evolution Center are the implementation of landscape ecology methods to multicellular systems in order to assess the onset and progression of cancer, and modeling of spatial heterogeneity and evolutionary dynamics of populations of cancer cells in order to assess disease recurrence and clonal expansion of resistant strains in adaptive cancer therapies.

Listed skills include Physics, Science, Mathematical Modeling, Simulations, and 19 others.