Hello!
I’m Alexander Lucaci

Postdoctoral Associate in Systems and Computational Biomedicine / WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE.

I am an evolutionary biologist focused on creating evolutionary methods and building atlas-style scientific resources for large-scale biological data. My work combines statistical modeling, comparative genomics, and computational infrastructure to detect patterns of adaptation, selection, and host–microbe dynamics across complex datasets.

Portrait of Alexander Lucaci

About me

I primarily use computational approaches to study how viruses evolve in relation to their hosts' immune responses, with a broader focus on predictive evolutionary biology and scalable biosurveillance frameworks.

My current work and research interests include:

Publications

highlights
BUSTED+S+MH

Evolutionary Shortcuts via Multinucleotide Substitutions and Their Impact on Natural Selection Analyses

MBE • 2023

Inference and interpretation of evolutionary processes, in particular of the types and targets of natural selection affecting coding sequences, are critically influenced by the assumptions built into statistical models and tests. If certain aspects of the substitution process (even when they are not of direct interest) are presumed absent or are modeled with too crude of a simplification, estimates of key model parameters can become biased, often systematically, and lead to poor statistical performance.

RASCL

RASCL: Rapid Assessment of Selection in CLades through molecular sequence analysis

PLoS ONE • 2022

An important unmet need revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic is the near-real-time identification of potentially fitness-altering mutations within rapidly growing SARS-CoV-2 lineages. Although powerful molecular sequence analysis methods are available to detect and characterize patterns of natural selection within modestly sized gene-sequence datasets, the computational complexity of these methods and their sensitivity to sequencing errors render them effectively inapplicable in large-scale genomic surveillance contexts.

Public Engagement

outreach

NYC subway microbiome talk

The Subway’s Invisible Microbiome

AMNH SciCafe • Feb 4, 2026 • New York, NY

Public talk on how urban metagenomics reveals hidden microbial and viral ecosystems in the NYC subway and how localized sampling scales into global atlas-building and biosurveillance efforts.

Blogs & Media

writing

Viral evolution in the cosmos

Book Chapter • Fundamentals of Space Medicine and Clinical Technology • 2026

Space travel exposes human beings to unique environmental stressors (e.g., radiation, microgravity) and induces significant physiological changes in hosts, profoundly impacting host–virus dynamics and creating conditions conducive to viral evolution.

A VAST New View of Viruses

Media • Weill Cornell Medicine • 2025

A major new effort at Weill Cornell Medicine seeks to catalog the normal human virome, the immense ecosystem of viruses that lives in and on us. The work, part of a multi-institution collaboration called Viromes Across Space and Time (VAST), supported by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, will pioneer new techniques, illuminate a crucial aspect of human biology that was impossible to study before, and establish a baseline set of data that could help in preventing, diagnosing and treating disease.