I am currently an assistant research professor working in the Fofanov Lab in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. I am interested in the development and application of computational and statistical methods to analyze genomic sequence data. I am currently involved with several projects in the Fofanov lab, including the development of VaST, a program which finds the minimum number of variant genomic sites which will differentiate all known strains of a bacterial species. VaST was specifically designed to help build panels that will work well in an PCR amplicon sequencing protocol. I am also working on a related piece of software that will help design optimized sets of primers for these reactions.
I earned my Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology working in the Cartwright Lab in the Human and Comparative Genomics Laboratory at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. My previous research focused on consequences of isolation-by-distance, a phenomenon which results in the formation of spatial genetic structure in a population due to limited dispersal. As a part of this work, I developed simulations and statistical methods for analyzing spatial population genetic data.