I love tree structures, and I had amazing mentors during my postdoc whom introduced me to phylogenetic trees and random structures. My doctoral research (in mathematics and theoretical computer science) gave me a good general foundation. During my postdoc at UPenn, I sought out mentors who were passionate about trees (and graphs/networks): Joel Spencer (NYU) on random structures and algorithms, and Tandy Warnow (then at UPenn, now at U Illinois) on phylogenetic trees.

• creativity
• persistence
• ability to work in teams
• analytic problem solving skills
• programming

My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in computer science and mathematics, and I worked as a programmer for a start-up for several years. So, I had the computational and quantitative skills but only had a year of biology, so needed to learn much more biology. I spent a year at the University of Texas, attending graduate seminars and working with (very patient) biologists on research projects.

I focus on tree structures used to model evolutionary histories, binary search trees, and ways to compare and visualize these structures. One major goal is to use the underlying structure of the space of trees to improve the search for optimal trees as well as the analysis and visualization of such searches.