About Me

I have found joy in advancing the vision of enabling an understanding of biology at the proteoform level, peering into the cellular machinery in a way that reveals precisely which molecule is acting in the biological system. Recently, I have been working in Emma Lundberg’s lab on understanding how the expression of these molecules varies between individual cells in space and time. Emma Lundberg’s group has a wealth of experience in using microscopy to yield biological images that paint a picture of this cell-to-cell heterogeneity of protein expression information, and joining her lab has deepened my expertise in integrating datasets to perform innovative analyses of single-cell protein expression. I hope to extend this towards analyzing single-cell proteoform expression, understanding the heterogeneity and flux between these proteoforms in space and time, and digging into the fundamental insights about human biology these data may reveal.

My research activities

My research career has progressed through an eclectic series of research topics. I began with chemistry research in my undergraduate education, studying phthaloylphosphine chemistry with Brian A. O’Brien at Gustavus Adolphus College and studying the chemistry of PTFE (i.e., Teflon®) emulsification polymerization in Joseph S. Thrasher’s lab at the University of Alabama. From there, I started my Ph.D. studies in the lab of Kyoung-Shin Choi at the University of Wisconsin studying the deposition of metal oxides using electrochemistry, but the research group was not a good fit for me. Leaving Kyoung-Shin’s group after several months was a difficult decision, but one I am very happy I made. I landed in Lloyd M. Smith’s group, which is much more loosely structured and where I had more freedom to explore. I decided to study the bioinformatics surrounding identifying proteins in his group, and I applied and was accepted for the competitive training program for Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine (CIBM). I have applied methods to help identify proteins with sequence changes that stem from variations in the genome, a field called proteogenomics. My final project before graduating from my doctoral program focused on developing software, named Spritz, which both applied improved methods for finding these sequence changes and facilitated the learning curve in proteogenomics. I have also applied myself to help identify proteoforms, which are specific modified protein sequences. These projects among others have resulted in twelve publications that have been cited over seventy times. This level of productivity was possible because of the highly collaborative nature of the research projects. I have worked with David Jarrard, M.D., and his group to uncover long noncoding RNA molecules that are associated with aggressive prostate cancers. I have also led and participated in highly collaborative projects for developing software to enable this research, with around ten people (including multiple institutions in one case) working on the core software projects in the lab. This strong collaborative spirit along with my ability to work independently has helped make me a successful researcher.