I am a computational and molecular geneticist and an Associate Data Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and the Institute for Data Science in Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where I work with Dr. Arjun Bhattacharya and Dr. Paul Scheet. My research asks how early-life environmental exposures act through the genome, often through parent-of-origin and imprinting mechanisms, to shape lifelong disease risk. I first pursued this in evolutionary genomics, studying intragenomic conflict and gene-by-environment effects in social insects during my Ph.D., and I now study it in human placental biology, where the same conflict between parental genomes plays out in the tissue that governs fetal development.

My current program builds isoform-resolved maps of placental gene regulation and uses them to explain how genotype and prenatal exposure jointly program offspring health. Using long-read RNA sequencing, I assembled the largest placental transcriptome to date, uncovering 14,985 novel isoforms of known genes that are absent from standard adult-tissue annotations. On that foundation I am constructing the first multi-ancestry, isoform-resolved placental GxE-xQTL atlas across roughly 2,200 placentas from nine cohorts and five ancestry groups, mapping how gestational diabetes, pre-pregnancy obesity, and PFAS exposure modify fetal genetic control of isoform expression, splicing, and alternative transcript usage. This spans cis-xQTL mapping within and across ancestries, cross-ancestry fine-mapping and colocalization with childhood metabolic GWAS, locus-resolved heritability partitioning, and decomposition of genetic signals into direct fetal versus maternal indirect polygenic components. I also model parent-of-origin regulation and its disruption by exposure, accounting for somatic mosaicism in the placenta.

Much of my methods work makes these observational analyses causal. I develop mediation frameworks that combine genetically predicted expression as instruments with multi-omic negative controls, using generative adversarial networks to calibrate confounding bias, released in the open-source ICONIC R package. Alongside this, I run an independent bioinformatics consulting practice, evaluating therapeutic targets through pan-cancer TCGA and DepMap CRISPR analyses. I am currently seeking tenure-track Assistant Professor positions.