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I am a postdoctoral researcher with Matthew Stephens at the University of Chicago.
I have accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Duke University, where my primary appointment is in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Department, and I am a member of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. Please email me if you are currently applying for postdoc positions and are interested in joining my lab in fall 2012!
I received a K99/R00 award from the NIH (NHGRI).
I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. I was advised by Michael Jordan, and collaborated with Steven Brenner.
My thesis research involved predicting protein molecular function using a phylogenetic-based methodology that captures how molecular function evolves in a protein family, which is encoded in a statistical graphical model.
Before grad school, I worked for two years at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing planning software and algorithms for autonomous spacecraft. During grad school, I spent a summer at Google Research working on hierarchical Dirichlet processes and implementing mean field methods for parameter estimation using MapReduce. After grad school, I spent a year working at 23andMe, considering statistical models for analysis of genomic data.
My postdoctoral work includes the following projects (see Research for more information):
- Sparse factor analysis for estimating population structure and admixture
- Statistical models for improving power to detect trans-expression quantitative trait loci
- Genome-wide association study to find SNPs that impact response to amphetamine