I am a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Pulin Li at the Whitehead Institute & MIT, with funding support from the Jane Coffin Childs Fund and an NIGMS K99 award. As a postdoc, I developed single-molecule microscopy strategies to understand how Sonic Hedgehog forms long-range signaling gradients.

As a graduate student with Prof. Jasper Rine at UC Berkeley, I developed and deployed new synthetic biology tools to understand how protein aggregation affects yeast aging, and to determine how nucleosomes store and transmit epigenetic memory. Prior to graduate school I worked with Prof. Leonid Kruglyak at Princeton to understand the genetic basis of complex traits.

My future research will explore the molecular mechanisms of cell-cell communication in animals. This work will require an interdisciplinary approach that merges the tool base of synthetic biology with the knowledge base of developmental biology and immunology to understand the activity of signaling proteins in situ. This work will build directly on the single-molecule microscopy-based experiments I developed as a postdoc.

Throughout my career, my research mission will be intertwined with a parallel personal mission: to recruit, train, mentor and celebrate the next generation of scientists whose backgrounds and ambitions reflect the rich diversity of our field.