I joined the Vanderbilt Department of Biomedical Informatics as a postdoc in September 2017. My primary interests are in sequential modeling of medical data for both sleep and circadian applications and generalizable clinical decision support enabled by a better understanding of disease progression and effective interventions.
I began my research endeavors as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, where I studied the influence of insect hormones on neuron growth in regions of the honeybee brain related to olfactory memory. Although I didn’t work on honeybees for long, this experience gave me a passion for research and so I set out to obtain a PhD in pharmacology.
Little did I know that my PhD research at the University of Pennsylvania would not take me far from honeybees, as I ended up working on fruit flies. During my time in the lab of Aalim Weljie, I focused on developing mass spectrometry-based methods to quantify and understand circadian rhythms in global metabolism. I developed a way to measure metabolic dynamics in vivo through the incorporation of isotope tracers, and analogously developed an approach to simulate the flow of isotopically-labeled atoms through metabolic networks. Through all this, I gained an appreciation for the difficulties of interpreting high-dimensional omics data.
I departed the Hughey Lab in August 2018 to pursue my goal of a startup based on in silico drug discovery.
Outgoing haiku
Snake sleep cycles rhyde Zeit gegeben unit tests Awake my growthWAS