PhD Student
Marine Toxicology Laboratory
Texas A&M Galveston
2x Fightin' Texas Aggie
Integrating -omic data into metabolic modeling frameworks to advance in silico new approach methodologies
I'm a first-year PhD student at Texas A&M University Galveston, working in the Marine Toxicology Laboratory under Dr. David Hala. My research focuses on building constraint-based metabolic models of zebrafish development by integrating metabolomic (chemical fingerprints) and transcriptomic (snapshots of gene expression) data. This work is fueled by collaboration with Hagler Institute Fellow Dr. Robyn Tanguay, a world-class environmental and molecular toxicologist at Oregon State University. Together, we aim to advance New Approach Methodologies, computational and in silico alternatives to traditional animal testing that can better predict toxicological outcomes.
Before starting my PhD, I completed a B.S. in Biomedical Sciences with minors in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Research from Texas A&M University. As an undergraduate, I built end-to-end RNA-seq and miRNA-seq pipelines for longitudinal differential expression analysis of bovine mammary gland development in the lab of Dr. Monique Rijnkels, work that earned me the International Milk Genomics Consortium Student Speaker Award. I also completed an NIH-funded research internship at Oregon Health & Science University in the lab of Dr. Lisa Karstens, where I benchmarked taxonomic reference databases for 16S rRNA urobiome amplicon sequencing pipelines.
Outside the lab, I live in the Galveston area with my dog Peter. I have been indoctrinated into the Aggie Football cult, but I grew up in Dallas and remain a diehard Cowboys, Rangers, Stars, and Mavs fan. Galveston has no shortage of interesting things to explore, and I have picked up light microscopy as a hobby. I have a Raspberry Pi connected to an old microscope that I use to capture images of whatever catches my eye.
Long-term, I am hoping to find work at the intersection of computational biology and toxicology, whether in industry, government research, or beyond.
Explainers, methods notes, and project updates
Outside the Lab
Open to collaborations in computational biology,
systems toxicology, and multi-omics modeling.