Lab Members

Carlos F. Lopez Ph. D.: My formal training has been in the fields of chemistry, physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular cell biology with a unique emphasis on the development and application of modeling techniques. I apply my skill-set in cell molecular and systems biology with a focus in cancer research. Given my training from atomic interactions to continuum-cellular interactions I am deeply interested in how events that take place at one space-time scale (e.g. quantum interactions) have an effect on the interactions at the macroscale. From this perspective, cancer biology is a perfect area of application to my theoretical interests due to its inherent multi-scale properties. At the same time, I believe a thorough understanding of cancer development and progression necessitates the development of a multi-scale theoretical foundation that can account for events such as DNA/genomic level aberrations (atomic space and time scales), protein malfunctions, and others, and their propagation to proteins (molecular scales), organelles, cells, and ultimately organs. My driving hypothesis is that understanding the events involved in cancer at multiple scales and developing theories and models to explore cancer biology from systems perspective are key to developing novel successful cancer treatments. This goal is quite ambitious, and I am approaching it by initially focusing on cell signaling pathways that exhibit dysregulation in cancer phenotypes. I also work on trying to provide a novel theoretical understanding of cancer progression that, in turn, will open new possibilities for targeted treatments.

Staff (General interests):

Jonathan Lifferth : Research Analyst (MS Pharmacology) : Tracking hepatocellular cancer cell movement
Yukthi Papanna Suresh : Software Developer (MS Computer Science) : Scientific software for numerical computing, software vulnerability analysis, web-based dissemination and visualization.

Graduate Students (Program: General interests):

Michael Irvin (Interdisciplinary, Sys Bio & Stats): Machine learning, signaling crosstalk, model calibration and analysis.
Samantha Beik (Medical Sciences Training Program): Cell identity, cell growth dynamics, cell response to perturbations.
Bryan Glazer (Biomedical Informatics): Network modeling, machine learning, information theory.
Perry Wasdin (Chemical and Physical Biology) : Network analysis, machine learning, information theory.
Rebecca Creed (Mechanical Engineering) : Information Theory, Complex Systems
Mafe Senosain (Cancer Biology) : Computational biology, bioinformatics, data analysis.

Postdoctoral Fellows (General interests):

Alexander Lubbock, PhD: Modeling infrastructure and dynamic cellular processes with single-cell resolution.
Mustafa Ozen, PhD: Computational Systems Biology, Machine Learning, Optimization.
Federico Fontana, PhD: Computational chemistry and Theoretical Chemistry with several applications in the field of materiomics, nanomedicine and biology.
Martina Prugger, PhD: Numerical algorithms, scientific computing, high performance computing, and biological applications.
James Pino, PhD: Multi-omics analysis, data mining, automated model generation, stochastic simulation methods, GPU programming.

Rotation Students:

Liane Vásquez-Weber : Summer Intern (Texas Tech University, Computer Science and Biology)

Visiting (General interests):

Naotoshi Nakamura, PhD, Associate Professor at Osaka University: Cell response to drug treatment, signaling models.

Alumni:

Oscar Ortega. PhD | Vanderbilt, Quantitative and Chemical Biology
Shawn Garbett, MS | Vanderbilt U, Assistant in Biostatistics
Erin Shockley, PhD | Data Scientist, Ascension
Leonard Harris, PhD | Asst. Professor at U of Arkansas, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
Blake Wilson, PhD | Research Associate at U of Texas at Dallas, Dept. of Bioengineerin
Michael Kochen PhD | Postdoc at U of Washington at Seattle, Dept of Bioengineering
Melaine Sebastian | SCLC cell identity. Forever in our hearts.
Geena Ildefonso PhD | Vanderbilt, Chemical and Physical Biology