I’m a Statistical Geneticist and Software Engineer who works at the intersection of science and AI to discover and develop new treatments for disease. I received my PhD from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and did post-doctoral training at Columbia University. My academic research has focused on using multi-omic data to uncover how genetic variation shapes human health. I have co-founded two companies, Variant Bio and Fiix.
There is a pressing need for new ways to treat disease, but drug development has become increasingly difficult due to high costs and failure rates. Human genetics has the power to transform drug development, because it uses human diversity to identify the basis of disease and resistance to it. Variant Bio is developing therapies that will improve global health by studying the genes of people who are outliers for medically relevant traits.
Visit websiteFiix Software provides a cloud-based computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) for mid to large size enterprises. At its core, a CMMS tracks and schedules maintenance performed on equipment, inventory usage, and personnel time. Fiix has revolutionized the CMMS through ease of use, powerful data analytics, AI integration, and deployment on mobile platforms. Fiix was acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2020.
Visit websiteMuch of my recent work has focused on building genomic resources for populations that have been historically underrepresented in genomic research. In South Africa, the South African Blood Regulatory (SABR) study produced the largest continental African QTL dataset to date, mapping regulatory variation in blood to enable the interpretation of GWAS findings. In Madagascar, mid-pass whole genome sequencing enabled the first genome-wide association study in the country. In the Faroe Islands, we generated the first whole genomes from the population, providing insight into its ancestry and recent selection. In Polynesia, we characterized the nested founder effects that shaped the settlement of the Pacific, from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi, work featured on the cover of Science.
The Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) project aims to understand the effect of genetic variation on gene expression across diverse human tissues, and is one of the largest eQTL studies to date. As a lead analyst in the GTEx Analysis Working Group I have contributed to studies of cis and trans regulatory effects, and am responsible for the generation and analysis of allele-specific expression data.
GTEx PortalA full list of my publications is available through Google Scholar.
If you’d like to get in touch, drop me a line and let’s connect.
