I am a postdoctoral researcher in Katherine Pollard's lab, at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco. One focus of my research is on developing computational and statistical methods for the evolutionary analysis of massive sets of metagenomic data, i.e., microbial DNA extracted directly from uncultured, environmental samples via high-throughput sequencing. This work is part of the iSEEM project, a collaboration funded by the Moore Foundation. I am also excited to be working on a project with Nadav Ahituv's lab on decoding gene regulatory sequences.
Before coming here, I was a graduate student advised by Richard Karp in the Theory Group in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. I worked mainly in combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms, particularly for problems in graph theory, though my interests in theoretical computer science range widely.
I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley at the
end of 2007 and a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from
Harvard University in 2000.