BIO

I studied mathematics and molecular biology at the University of Connecticut and received a BS in each in 2014.  I am currently a PhD candidate in Genomics and Computational Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.  My research focuses on quantification of RNA alternative splicing in large heterogeneous datasets.  I began with a modeling approach to correct for unwanted within-group variance - that is, variance that does not contribute meaningful information about splicing.  Currently I am developing an alternative model which accounts for heterogeneity by treating samples as independent.  In the future, I plan to apply these models in collaborations with Sarah Tishkoff to robustly quantify splicing in African subpopulations, Casey Brown in the study of splicing quantitative trait loci (sQTLs), and Weill-Cornell's Hagen Tilgner to derive splicing information from synthetic long read (SLR) RNA-seq.