 |
Contact Information
email: physical: |
I am a postdoc in the group of Katherine Pollard in the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). I completed my PhD in 2009 under Mona Singh in the Computer Science Department and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.
I use the tools of computer science and statistics to address problems in evolution, molecular biology, and biomedicine.
Humans differ from one another and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, in a wide range of traits, including our susceptibility to many diseases. I model the evolutionary processes that have produced these novel traits and develop algorithms that compare genomes to predict the functional relevance of specific genetic differences between individuals and species.
My research is motivated by several questions:
- How have evolutionary processes produced the astonishing diversity of form and function present in the natural world?
- How can better algorithms lead to a deeper understanding of biological systems and networks?
- How do genomes encode and maintain the information necessary to produce life?
- How can our increasing knowledge of genomic variation be translated into the treatment and prevention of disease?
I investigate these questions in a number of model systems, but my main focus is on the origins and recent evolution of human populations and their primate relatives.