About Me

I am a Master’s in Computer Science student at Tufts University in Medford, MA. Prior to my arrival at Tufts, I worked as an office manager and assistant at a literary agency in Brooklyn, NY. I earned a B.S. in Biology from The University of Alabama in 2016, where I wrote my honors senior thesis on the use of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) to detect endocrine-disrupting compounds in mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus) tissues.

While at Tufts, I’ve been active in computational biology research: I’ve contributed to the development of a disease gene prioritization algorithm, ADAGIO (see GitHub; paper published in the ACM-BCB 2022 Conference Proceedings) and am currently working on a project analyzing DNA repair, which is the subject of my DREAM research this summer.

In my spare time, I bake, hike, and draw. I plan to graduate with my M.S. in Computer Science in May 2023.

About My Advisor

Lenore Cowen is a professor of Computer Science at Tufts University. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT. Her research areas include applications of graphs, networks, and algorithms in computational biology, and span from PPI prediction to coral reef genetics and ecology.

About My Project

Abstract:

Pairwise sequence alignment is a necessary step in DNA repair analysis. A sequence that has undergone repair from a lesion such as a double-strand break must be aligned to a representation of its original source to identify any mutations that occurred in the process. Pairwise sequence alignment methods are commonly used in the identification of common ancestry or function between nucleotide or amino acid sequences. In these cases, researchers seek an optimal alignment that minimizes the misaligned characters between source and query sequences. Multiple such optimal alignments may exist between the same two sequences. When studying DNA repair, small differences between otherwise similarly-optimal alignments may confound characterization of repair pathways. To address this problem, we developed a custom pairwise sequence aligner designed to maximize control over alignment scoring and produce output designed specifically for ease of comparing repair outcomes.

The full text of my final report is available here.

My Blog

I update my weekly blog here.