Biography

As of September 1, 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Please visit my lab’s website for more recent information and news about my work!

I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with Bogdan Pasaniuc and Michael Gandal. Mainly, I develop statistical methods for genetic association and epidemiological studies and implement them to understand how biological heterogeneity influences health outcomes and disparities in cancer and neuropsychiatric disorders. I am also a Fellow of the UCLA Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences.

I graduated with a PhD in Biostatistics from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020, supervised by Mike Love in Biostatistics and Melissa Troester in Epidemiology. I was a recipient of the UNC Center of Environment Health and Susceptibility Training Grant and previously the Susan G. Komen Graduate Training Fellowship in Breast Cancer Disparities. During my graduate work, I have closely collaborated with Hudson Santos and Rebecca Fry at the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions to study the importance of placental genetic and epigenetic variation in the risk of autism spectrum disorder and other neuropsychiatric developmental disorders from a multiomic perspective. I graduated in 2015 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Biology and a B.S. in Mathematical Decision Sciences. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the Mackenzie Family Foundation Innovation Scholarship, a four-year, full scholarship given to only two students applying to UNC-Chapel Hill every year.