I am a population geneticist and computational biologist. I develop population genetic theory and computational methods for structural variation and pangenomes, and use them to study how archaic introgression and admixture shaped human genomes.
Current work
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Akey Lab at Princeton University. My postdoctoral work focuses on making the full spectrum of human genetic variation, especially structural variation, accessible to population and statistical genetics. I developed LongHap, a long-read phasing method that improves haplotype reconstruction of INDELs and structural variants and integrates the methylation signal already present in PacBio and Oxford Nanopore data. I am now extending these ideas to phased de novo genome assembly, developing population-genetic models tailored to the mutational processes of structural variants, and building methods that perform population-genetic analyses directly on pangenome graphs.
In parallel, I develop spatially explicit models and simulation-based, machine-learning methods, including graph neural networks applied to ancestral recombination graphs, to infer population history across space and time.
Background
I received my Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology with Joseph Lachance. My dissertation, Theoretical and Empirical Population Genetics of Admixture and Introgression, combined theory and large-scale data analysis: I developed a model showing how a heterogeneous hybrid genetic background changes the fate of introgressed alleles, tested its predictions in 30,780 recently admixed genomes, and showed how uncertainty affects estimates of sex-biased admixture from X-chromosomal and autosomal ancestry. I also contributed to studies of the genetic architecture of prostate cancer and androgenetic alopecia in men of African ancestry.
Before that, I earned an M.S. at Georgia Tech in the lab of Mark Borodovsky, where I developed MgCod for gene prediction in phage genomes that use multiple genetic codes, and a B.S. in Biomedical Sciences at Reutlingen University.