Research Experience

I started in wet lab research at Tufts University. During the academic year, I worked in Dr. Juliet Furhman’s infectious disease lab studying chitin metabolism as a therapeutic target for parasitic nematodes. For two separate summers, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Research for Undergraduate (REU) grant to conduct research. The first grant supported my research at the Mount Desert Island Biological lab in Dr. Bruce Stanton’s lab studying the effects of environmental toxicology on cystic fibrosis development. The second fellowship supported my research at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Dr. Marie-Louise Hammarskjold’s lab studying HIV drug targets.

I took time away from research after college and came back to it after recognizing that I would be a more effective technical product manager if I had practical experience in a fully technical role. After four years at Count Me In, I pivoted into a full time computational biology research in the Wagle lab at the Broad Institute and Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

For two years I worked on various efforts to accelerate our understanding of drug resistance in metastatic breast cancer patients. My largest effort was on building out a database of 8+ years of processed clinical and genomic data. I organized BAMs and conducted secondary analysis for bulk RNA and WES so collaborators and staff could plug in and generate cohorts. I started by working directly with the sequencing lab to find all the sequencing data on prem or in the cloud. This required writing scripts that pulled together 20+ spreadsheets with incomplete and unstandardized data and aggregating key clinical data elements. The output was all the data mapped to a single data model. I then benchmarked a variant calling pipeline and an RNA alignment and quantification pipeline and ran all the samples through for standardized outputs. This enabled the database to be a one-stop-shop for users to build cohorts.

Once the database was mostly developed, I used it to do my own research. I created a cohort of patients who had received CDK4/6 inhibitors to study acquired and intrinsic resistance. I also led the technical analysis and was a first author on a phase II clinical trial: A phase II study of efficacy, toxicity, and the potential impact of genomic alterations on response to eribulin mesylate in combination with trastuzumab and pertuzumab in women with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)+ metastatic breast cancer.