Lucas Gillenwater is a postdoctoral researcher who joined the Greene Lab in August 2025. Prior to working in research, Lucas worked as a high school biology teacher, a bread baker, and a research assistant at National Jewish Hospital. In June of 2025, Lucas completed his PhD in Computational Bioscience at the University of Colorado Anschutz under the mentorship of Drs. Jim Costello and Larry Hunter. During graduate school he developed methods to integrate multiple omic profiles to better understand co-occurring conditions in people with Down syndrome.
Lucas has diverse research interests, from path finding algorithms through knowledge graphs to rigorous model development.
More recently, he is exploring the capabilities of the next generation of pre-trained biomedical foundation models.
We are excited that AI tools lead to faster model development for drug response prediction.
However, model evaluation has not adapted to the AI age.
He is working on leakage-proof evaluations that can assess if the models actually learn biology.