About me

I am PhD Candidate at Emory University, in the Computer Science and Informatics - Biomedical Informatics program. I have been a researcher in the Bhasin Systems Biomedicine Lab since January 2021, joining after graduating from Georgia Tech with a BSc in biomedical engineering in December 2020. I started the Computer Science and Informatics PhD program, with a concentration in Biomedical Informatics, in August 2021, earning a MSc in Computer Science and Informatics in 2024 after becoming a PhD candidate.

Background

I grew up in Dacula, Georgia, attending Buford High School. After graduation, I moved to Atlanta in 2016 to study at Georgia Tech. During my coursework in the biomedical engineering program, I discovered my passion for informatics analysis of different diseases. In my third year of undergrad, I decided to explore biomedical data analysis projects and secured an internship at a medical startup in Mountain View, CA. The experience exposed me to bioinformatics, which I found fascinating due to its blend of biology, statistics, and computer science. Upon returning to Atlanta, I actively sought out research labs at Emory and Georgia Tech that focused on bioinformatics for biological studies.

I worked as an undergraduate researcher in the Jo Lab from 2019 to 2020, where I assisted with the scRNA-seq, scATAC-seq, and lncRNA analysis of endothelial cell reprogramming in the carotid artery. This was my first introduction to academic research, and I had the opportunity to work on their 2020 publication in Cell Reports. Through this experience, I knew I wanted to pursue research further and develop more bioinformatics-specific skills. In the beginning of 2021, I applied to the Emory CSI/BMI PhD program, and sought out to join the Bhasin Lab because of their projects in cancer and development of bioinformatics tools.

My Research

Because of the low prevalence of cancer in children compared to adults, there is historically a lack of publicly available datasets and specific research pertaining to childhood cancers compared to adult. Multiple large-scale adult studies and platforms have been generated that utilize transcriptomic, proteomic, and epigenomic technologies to characterize adult cancer and diseases, such as the The Cancer Genome Atlas Program by NCI. However, datasets of this size are not available for pediatric cancers, and pediatric and adult cancers are typically treated as separate entities.

Through the Bhasin lab’s collaborations with the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders center our lab has generated multiple large pediatric leukemia single-cell atlases. My research is in (i) the omics analysis of pediatric leukemias to characterize the heterogeneity within subtypes and to understand the dysregulation at the single-cell level that may lead to the development of these diseases, and (ii) the development of and (iii) application of bioinformatics tools and methods to facilitate the analysis of large-scale datasets of pediatric leukemia.