Welcome!

I am a bioinformatics scientist skilled in the analysis of next-generation sequencing data (whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, bulk RNAseq, and single-cell RNAseq). Broadly, I am passionate about utilizing bioinformatics as a tool to understand genetic variant, human health, and diseases. More speciifcally, I am interested in sex differences from the angle of genetics and genomics. Topics of great interest to me that I would love to pursue long-terms are: genetics underlying neurodevelopmental disorders, X chromosome inactivation, connections between the placenta and pregnancy complications and/or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Currenty I am a post-doctoral scientist at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. I am working on undertanding relevant cell types for traits/diseasese from GWAS variants and scRNAseq data. I am also part of the support team for FUMA (https://fuma.ctglab.nl/), which is an online tool to perform functional annotation post-GWAS.

Previously I was a bioinformatics scientist at Xbiome where I am investigating the relationship between the tumor neoantigens and the gut microbiota to better treat cancer patients using immunotherapy. Before joining Xbiome, I was a bioinformatics scientist at Ambry Genetics where I maintained and developed in-house pipelines for somatic variant identification from NGS data.

Prior to my brief stint in industry, I was a post-doc working with Dr. Melissa Wilson at Arizona State University where I investigated sex-differences to contribute to better understand human health. Briefly, I studied the process called X-chromosome-inactivation in the human placenta to understand factors that could contribute to pregnancuy complications. In addition, I developed bioinformatics pipelines to identify tumor neoantigens to study the neoantigens landscape of a patient with Lynch syndrome.

I earned my Ph.D. in the Bioinformatics program at the University of California, Los Angeles in December 2018. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Biology at the Massachusetts of Technology in June 2014.

News:

05/06/24 I will be attending the Organization for the Study of Sex Difference conference in Bergen, Norway.

04/25/23 Our work on undertanding patterns of X-inactivation in the human placenta is now published on HGG Advances: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666247722000379

10/03/19 Our work on understanding patterns of X-inactivation in the human placenta is now on bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/785105v1

05/22/19 My PhD work on understanding sex-biased demography in dogs and wolves is now published at Proceeding of Royal Society B: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.1976.

12/31/18 I started working with Dr. Melissa Wilson at Arizona State University as a post-doc.

11/26/18 I successfully defended my PhD thesis from the Bioinformatics program at UCLA.