Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Arnold Kriegstein’s Lab at The University of California - San Francisco. I’m interested in using a combination of bioinformatics and molecular biology to better understand the underlying heterogeneity present in the cerebral cortex. I’m also very interested in cell fate specification in the cerebral cortex and how factors impacting this specification may result in neurodevelopmental disorders. I finished my PhD at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Dr. Loyal Goff’s lab where I studied the long non-coding RNA Pantr2 and it’s involvement in murine corticogenesis.

Research Interests

Neurodevelopment and disease

A long term research interest of mine centers around neurodevelopment as it pertains to disease. Neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are not very well understood, due in part to the lack of understanding neural diversity and development. As such, I’m interested in aiding in untangling the diversity present in key regions in the central nervous system (CNS) such as the cortex and hippocampus. My principle approach in uncovering cell types involved in neuraldevelopmental disorders is single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq). scRNAseq is a quickly growing technique used to profile the transcriptomes of thousands of individual cells. From the data collected, we can assign cellular identity and cellular state, as well as cluster cells based on similar gene expression profiles. Currently, this technique is primarily being used to annotate cell atlases for different tissues of interest. While curating cell types within a given tissue is useful, important information about novel cell types can be discerned by analyzing datasets with observable phenotypes.