Rate My Professor Luis Hernandez-Nunez

Luis Hernandez-Nunez is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University, where he leads the Hernandez-Nunez Lab. He earned a Ph.D. in Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology from Harvard University in 2020, conducting his doctoral research in Aravinthan Samuel’s lab on molecules, cells, and circuits mediating thermal homeostasis in larval Drosophila. Prior to graduate school, he was an undergraduate and postbaccalaureate researcher in Thierry Emonet’s lab at Yale University and studied mechatronics engineering at the National University of Engineering in Peru. He completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University with Florian Engert, supported by a Life Sciences Research Foundation fellowship.

Hernandez-Nunez’s research focuses on the circuit mechanisms underlying heart-brain interactions and organismal circuits that implement multiorgan coordination and feedback control. He employs advanced engineering, genetics, and computational methods to study neural feedback control of organ function, primarily using larval zebrafish models. His academic appointments at Stanford include membership in Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and the Sarafan ChEM-H faculty fellowship. He has received numerous honors, including the Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar award, Branco Weiss Faculty Fellowship, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, Terman Faculty Fellowship, and the Leadership Award from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Key publications include work on the emergence of functional heart-brain circuits in a vertebrate, imaging whole-brain activity to understand behavior, and studies on thermal homeostasis and olfactory systems in Drosophila. He contributes to the field through roles in professional societies and awards supporting interdisciplinary research in neuroscience and physiology.