Augustin Luna, Ph.D.

Dr. Augustin Luna is a Stadtman Tenure-track Investigator and Distinguished Scholar with a primary appointment at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and a secondary appointment at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Research in the laboratory of Dr. Augustin Luna seeks to understand disease biology through the development of mechanistic and statistical computational models that involve various aspects of gene regulation, genomic alterations, proteomics, and metabolism both through pan-cancer analysis and analysis of specific cancers, including rare cancers. The goal of the work is to address key questions in our understanding of network properties of human disease and to utilize this knowledge to improve treatment options and clinical decision-making through interpretable methodologies.

In support of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles of scientific research, Augustin has been a long-term member of communities working on standardized representations of biological data (e.g., the Biological Pathway Exchange format and the Systems Biology Graphical Notation). These data representations are key components of several molecular interaction databases and a basis for network-based methods and software tools that Dr. Luna has worked with colleagues to build in order to address key questions in our understanding of network properties of human disease.

Dr. Luna has a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Boston University as part of a joint program with the National Cancer Institute. He earned a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and was previously a Research Associate at Harvard Medical School with an affiliation at the Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard. Before this, Dr. Luna was a post-doctoral researcher at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Dr. Luna has received The Fund for Innovation in Cancer Informatics (ICI) Discovery Grant, BroadIgnite Award, Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA), and, earlier, a Dissertation Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Dr. Luna is a regular presenter of both national and international conferences.