About Me

I am postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Center for Nonlinear Studies as well as the Bioenergy and Biome Sciences. I was previously a research fellow at the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, in the microbiome research program.

My research interests are in applied dynamical systems in biology and biochemistry, and in understanding the dynamics of complex interaction networks. I am interested in modeling, simulation, and analysis of biological systems and networks, the analysis of experimental data in biology, and the ways in which these topics can be brought together to answer questions in biology.

My PhD thesis, entitled Polynomial Dynamical Systems & Interaction Network Models, was on the topic of the dynamical systems that arise when one models a network of interacting chemical or biochemical species. This work connected the long term behavior of these systems with structural network properties that are robust to changes in kinetic parameters. I was advised by Prof. Gheorghe Craciun.

At the Mayo Clinic, I studied the human microbiome, the ecosystem of microbiota in the human body, in the lab of Dr. Nicholas Chia. I worked on simulating the community and population dynamics of the microbiome, and establishing the fundamental properties of this dynamical system. To pursue this goal, I investigated the extent to which different models can recapitulate experimental data, and to what extend the real microbiome violates the rules implied by various models. In this way, we began to establish the most promising methods for modeling the microbiome, and to test the fundamental mechanisms which might explain the microbiome.

Additionally, I have worked with Dr. Gina Suh and Mayo Clinic's phage therapy team to design intelligent dosing schedules for phage treatment of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.

In addition to my work on the microbiome, I am also working on a method of integrating transcriptomic and epigenetic data to model gene regulation. That work is in collaboration with Prof. Kord Kober at the University of California, San Francisco, Prof. Timothy Downing at the University of California, Irvine, and Prof. Eric Mjolsness at the University of California, Irvine.