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.

Background

I grew up in Dacula, Georgia and went to Buford High School. After high school, I moved to Atlanta in 2016 to attend Georgia Tech, then moved to Decatur when I began my graduate school program at Emory. My interest in computer science and data analysis began during my time at Georgia Tech, when I found I was more interested in the coding portion of my studies rather than the hands-on engineering courses. After my third year of undergrad, I wanted to try something new and applied for multiple internships related to biomedical data analysis. I spent the summer of 2019 at a medical startup in Mountain View, CA and was assigned to a team tasked with developing a bioinformatics pipeline for their human sequencing data - this was my first introduction to bioinformatics - and found I really enjoyed the hybrid nature of the field, where I got to utilize my knowledge of biology and statistics/computer science methods from my courses. When I got back to Atlanta, I searched for research labs at Emory and Georgia Tech that utilized bioinformatics to study diseases.

I worked as an undergraduate researched at 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 cancer. 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.

My research is in (i) the omics analysis of pediatric cancers to characterize the heterogenetiy within cancer 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 application of bioinformatics tools and methods to facilitate the analysis of large-scale datasets of pediatric cancers.