Welcome
About Me
I am a PhD candidate in the Immunology Graduate Program at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. I currently work in the Miraldi Lab at CCHMC.
I recieved my BS (2013) and MS (2015) in Biology from Ball State University. During my MS program I worked for 1.5 years in the Eli Lilly and Company drug discovery group researching and developing high-throughput experiments to analyze inhibition of triglyceride synthesis. After graduation, I worked for 1.5 years as a lab manager in the lab of Dr. Andrew Lindsley in the Department of Allergy and Immunology at CCHMC studying Kabuki syndrome. Most of my work in the Lindsley lab was experimental benchwork based in mice and humans. I started working on my PhD in the fall of 2017 where I was first exposed to coding and bioinformatics in the lab of Dr. Emily Miraldi. My time in the Miraldi lab has challenged me to grow academically and exposed me to concepts in computational biology, machine learning, genomics, immunology-based systems biology, mathematics, and engineering.
Current Research
My research focuses on developing computational methods to study how genomic regulation contributes to cellular behavior in rare immune cell types. Currently, I am working with a team of interdisciplinary scientists on a project called maxATAC. MaxATAC is a computational method that utilizes state-of-the-art machine-learning methods to predict transcription factor binding across cell types using ATAC-seq data and DNA sequence. Our plans are to use maxATAC to predict transcription factor binding in rare cell populations, like those derived from patient biopsies, where experimental ChIP-seq is not feasible.