University of California San Diego
San Diego, United States
Lukas Chavez is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Medical Genetics at the Department of Medicine, UC San Diego. His research interests focus on structural variants as well as circular extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in childhood brain tumors. Prior to joining UC San Diego, Dr. Chavez headed a research group in the Division of Pediatric Neurooncology at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. During this time, he made important contributions to the discovery of genetic and epigenetic alterations in childhood cancers and participated in the development of a novel diagnostic tool for the molecular classification of different types of brain tumors. The long-term goal of his laboratory is to identify oncogenic mechanisms and novel tumor-dependency genes and pathways that may provide new targets for improved therapeutic approaches. In addition, his laboratory develops and uses new statistical and machine learning tools for the quantitative and integrative analysis of heterogeneous genetic and epigenetic data.