Can Cenik

Cenik received his B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, followed by his Ph.D. in Genetics at Harvard Medical School with Dr. Frederick P. Roth. Prior to joining UT Austin, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Dr. Michael P. Snyder in genetics at Stanford University, School of Medicine. Cenik has received both an NIH early investigator award and a CPRIT recruitment award

The Cenik Lab investigates how cells determine protein abundance by combining high-resolution experimental measurements of gene expression with computational and AI-driven modeling. On the experimental side, we develop and apply methods such as Ribo-ITP for measuring translation across diverse biological contexts from early mammalian development to uncultured microbial communities. On the computational side, we build deep learning models such as RiboNN that can predict translation from mRNA sequence. Together, these efforts aim to establish a quantitative framework connecting genome sequence to protein output.