About me
Howdy, and thanks for visiting! I am a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia Institute of Bioinformatics working in Dr. Justin Bahl’s Lab. While at UGA, I have been active in promoting graduate student welfare and science communication. I am an active CWA-UCWGA union member. I have held leadership roles in the Bioinformatics Graduate Student Association, UGA Graduate Pride, and Athens Science Observer. I have also helped organize peer mentoring for the International Society of Nonbinary Scientists, seminar speakers for the Bioinformatics department, and graduate student satisfaction survey development. My research thus far has been focused on phylodynamics tools and methods, applied to avian influenza and SARS-CoV-2. I’m primarily interested in three research themes:
- How our choices in Bayesian phylogenetics impact epidemiologically relevant parameters in a way which is not expected (e.g., subsampling, passaging).
- Influenza phylodynamics and reassortment identification.
- Nextflow pipelines for epidemiologic inference across graph data structures.
Before arriving at UGA, I earned a Masters of Statistics degree at NC State University in Raleigh, NC and a B.S. degree in Mathematics at Clemson University in Clemson, SC. I spent a few years as a data scientist at TIAA, a financial services company, where I explored survival models for understanding customer experience, graph databases for a variety of projects including ETL consolidation and client retention modeling, and machine learning models for prospect identification (among other things, but those are my favorites!). While at TIAA, I helped design an enterprise-wide course on data science fundamentals, hosted bootcamps for using Python for data analysis, and, with my colleagues, put on several workshops around machine learning topics for University of NC at Charlotte’s Data Science Masters students. Outside of work, I climb (mostly bouldering), read science fiction and non-military history, and dote on my orange cat, Molotov, and Great Pyrenees, Zoya.
Feel free to reach out if you have a fun project you’d like to discuss; I’m always looking for more projects to keep me busy and love a good chat!
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