Abhinav Kannan

Hello there! I’m Abhinav Kannan, a fifth-year BS–MS student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune — welcome to my website!

I’m broadly interested in understanding how biological systems self-organize, maintain robustness, and adapt across scales, and exploring how disruptions to such homeostasis can lead to complex phenomena like cancer.

At the heart of my curiosity lies a fascination with how simple interactions give rise to emergent organization and adaptive behavior, spanning levels from cell populations to ecological communities. My research focuses on developing mathematical and computational models that balance biological realism with theoretical generality, drawing on frameworks from physics, mathematics, and systems biology.

I am currently pursuing my Master’s thesis with Prof. Dominik Wodarz in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at UC San Diego, where I develop models that integrate ecological and evolutionary processes in cancer. In particular, my work examines how spatial feedbacks, resource competition, and microenvironmental heterogeneity shape the adaptability and persistence of cancer stem cells within tumors.

This project extends ideas I began exploring with Prof. Mohit Kumar Jolly in the Cancer Systems Biology Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where I studied non-genetic heterogeneity and phenotypic plasticity in cancer. Using Boolean and ODE-based gene regulatory network models, I examined how cancer cells transition between multiple regulatory states and how the coupling of these transitions gives rise to emergent, population-level behaviors.

To gain firsthand experience with experimental biology, I trained in Prof. Thomas Pucadyil’s lab lab at IISER Pune, where I characterized protein–protein interactions involved in mitochondrial dynamics. While not directly shaping my current modeling work, this experience gave me a deeper appreciation for the nuances of experimental systems and what it truly means to build theory that engages meaningfully with data and biology.

Over the past few years, I’ve been selected to participate in several interdisciplinary workshops at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore, India and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India, including Unifying Theories in High-Dimensional Biophysics, Decisions, Games and Evolution, Spins, Games and Networks and Flags, Landscapes, Signaling. My intellectual trajectory and my approach to research has been deeply shaped by these workshops to say the very least, exposing me to a variety of things I have grown to become deeply interested in, and shaping my scientific outlook toward finding unifying principles across biological scales. These programs profoundly expanded my view of biology by introducing me to the language and toolkit of complex systems, information theory, and evolutionary dynamics, and further reinforcing my goal of connecting theory and experiment across scales.

When I am not working on my research, I am most probably out playing tennis, listening to music at unhealthily high volumes, ticking a book off my TBR list or geeking out about the latest tech out there.

I’m glad you found your way here ^__^ I love meeting and talking to new people so feel free to drop me an email if you’d like to chat about science (or anything else!)