Biography

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HIll in the Yun Li Lab. My research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The goal of my research is to develop statistical methods to address health disparities in statistical genetics. Specifically, I am interested in methods which extend summary statitsic-based approaches relying on LD reference panels to admixed populations.

So far in my graduate career, I have developed THUNDER, a deconvolution method for bulk Hi-C data to infer cell type proportions and cell-type specific interaction profiles. Additionally, I am the lead statistician on our lab’s transcriptome wide association study (TWAS) of blood cell traits in UK Biobank Europeans.

I graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky in 2017 with a B.S. in Mathematics. At Centre, I was awared the Brown Fellows Scholarship, a “full ride plus” scholarship which promotes experiential learning and ambassadorship through self-designed summer enrichment experiences and Kentucky connection trips.