I am currently a 4th-year PhD student in biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, I hope to complete my degree with a designated emphasis in computational biology. My primary research adviser is Prof. Sandrine Dudoit. Mark van der Laan is also a significant coadviser.
Most material is available through bSpace. Please contact me for access to other material as necessary.
The main focus of our research concerns multiple hypothesis testing and its applications to microarray-based studies of gene expression and genetic linkage. To this end, we are investigating resampling-based methods which select fine-tuned cutoffs and produce adjusted p-values for controlling generalized Type-I error rates (FWER, gFWER, TPPFP, FDR, etc.) upon estimating the joint null distribution of the test statistics being analyzed.
Another goal of this research is to contribute open-source software implementations of our methods to the R-dependent Bioconductor package, multtest(). This is ongoing work with Prof. Katherine Pollard. Click here for a preview of this work presented in Cambridge (UK) last spring.
Currently we are collaborating with Prof. Rachel Brem and applying our methods to examine complex genetic inheritance and interactions from a genetic cross experiment performed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Other applications have included microorganism cell cycle and transcription factor experiments, gene-gene and gene-treatment interaction analyses, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Variable and model selection techniques as well as (cross-validation) prediction methods are also interests of mine.
I was fortunate enough to have received predoctoral training support from the Berkeley Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG) while I finished up my coursework and mapped out my dissertation research. Click here to visit our research profile and to see what others are doing at the CIG.
Originally interested in mathematics, I obtained my Bachelor of Science degree in biology (molecular option) from Harvey Mudd College in the spring of 2000. My undergraduate research focused on characterizing molecular determinants of bacterial mercury resistance. The following year was spent on a Fulbright Fellowship studying European attitudes and policy relating to biotechnology and health at the Institut für Wissenschafts- u. Technikforschung (IWT) of the Universität Bielefeld, Germany. Returning to the United States, I worked for two years as a technician performing downstream microarray validation and molecular epidemiologic investigations in a Chlamydia trachomatis laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.
Before officially joining the Graduate Group in Biostatistics in the fall of 2005, I earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in epidemiology and biostatistics while interning with the California Department of Health Services Sexually Transmitted Disease Control Branch. The intersection of my previous interests - biology, health, statistics and policy - have brought me to where I am currently.
My ultimate goal is to one day direct my own investigations at the interface where computational and laboratory science meet. I would also love to contribute dialogue to science policy issues and the public understanding of science whenever possible.