Luis received his BS in Microbiology from the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao in 2016. He worked as a Research Assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting a Ph.D. in Genomics and Structural Biology at UC Berkeley. Luis is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Microbial Biology and Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. Besides science, Luis plays volleyball, and basketball and enjoys traveling around the world.
His PhD thesis focuses on reconstructing genomes from natural ecosystems to provide insights into previously unknown and little-known bacteria, archaea, and mobile genetic elements. Luis uses a combination of structural biology and ecosystem-scale genomics to interrogate the metabolic capacities of these microbes but also harness their novel proteins for biotechnological applications such as genome editing, novel antibiotics, and new drugs.