I am a postdoctoral researcher in computational biology in the Pollard Lab at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco.
One focus of my research has been on developing computational and statistical methods for the evolutionary analysis of metagenomic data, which are the pooled fragments of microbial DNA extracted directly from uncultured, environmental samples via high-throughput sequencing. I initiated this work as part of the iSEEM project, a collaboration funded by the Moore Foundation.
More recently, my research has concentrated on computational methods that help improve our understanding of gene regulation. I am excited to be collaborating on a project with the Ahituv Lab to identify and functionally decode very short, vertebrate regulatory sequences that enhance gene expression.
It is my current good fortune to be supported in this project by a National Research Service Award for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows (F32) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Prior to that I was funded briefly by a PhRMA Foundation Post Doctoral Fellowship in Bioinformatics.
Before coming to Gladstone, I studied under the mentorship of Richard Karp in the Theory Group in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. My graduate research focused on problems in combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms, mainly using a graph-theoretic framework.
I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in
Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University.