I was in high school when the human genome was published and I remember how amazing it was! As a graduate student, my advisor was interested in genome assembly and I thought "Wow! Math people can do biological problems?" From there, I was hooked!

• probability
• statistics
• programming
• mathematical modeling
• an inquisitive and creative spirit

I took some programming as an undergraduate, but mostly what I gained there was the confidence to explore and develop programming skills that I would need in research. My background in mathematics came from my undergraduate and graduate degrees in math.

My inquisitive spirit, I think I was just born with that. But as I've become more experienced I've become better at asking the right questions, the questions we might be capable of answering.

Computational biology problems involve lots of data, how can we determine what in the data reveals true biological information and which is noise?

Yes! I'm here at SACNAS right now and am definitely looking for graduate students.