My Scientific Journey
I earned my PhD in Microbiology at the University of California - Davis researching antimicrobial therapeutics and resistance. In pursuit of my degree, I gained an appreciation for how big data, metabolomics, and genomics could be used to generate and test hypotheses. I also developed an interest in using these tools to learn about the human microbiome, especially following the diagnoses of friends and family with immune diseases of the gastrointestinal tract.
This led me to eventually join the lab of Dr. Pat Schloss within the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. We investigated the usefulness of the fecal microbiome as a biomarker for the successful treatment of Crohn’s Disease (CD). Our findings are now published in the journal mBio and the code and data to generate this paper are available through GitHub.
Since then, I have continued to develop programming and data analysis skills in order to find creative solutions for challenging problems within large datasets.