About me
I'm a graduate research student pursuing a PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Utah. My current work is in identifying, curating, and understanding genomic structural variants (SVs).
I earned my Bachelor's of Science Degree in Bioinformatics with a minor in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 2016.
Graduate Research
De novo structural variants in ASD
There is a known enrichment of SVs in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). I analyzed the rates and patterns of spontaneous SVs in a very large ASD family cohort (published in AJHG) to learn more about how often these variants occur, what effects they have in ASD risk, the impact of parental age on SV risk, and the molecular mechanisms responsible. My work was featured in a Spectrum News article after I presented a poster at ASHG 2020.
Samplot
Visually reviewing the sequencing evidence for SVs is very important, because lots of false positives variant calls occur. Samplot (published in Genome Biology) facilitates making plots, filtering, and even curating via a deep learning classifier.
SV-plaudit
I developed a tool (published in GigaScience) for creating image views of genomic intervals, automatically storing them in the cloud, deploying a website to view/score them, and retrieving scores for analysis, with support for sequencing data from BAM or CRAM files from Illumina, or long-read technologies (ONT/PacBio).
Undergraduate research
Codon Bias
I worked with Justin Miller, under the supervision of Dr. Ridge, in a project targeted toward understanding evolutionary implications of non-random codon bias, leading to publication of Missing something? Codon aversion as a new character system in phylogenetics in Cladistics (2017).
Seismic Event Detector
In a project for a BYU CS Capstone in Big Data, my team (Artem Golotin, Darian Ramage, and I) developed a scalable system for monitoring streaming seismic signals in a developing aftershock sequence. This could be used to study earthquakes in more detail (as well as to identify illicit nuclear testing). Presented at LLNL and BYU.
