Hello! I am a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. I am co-supervised by Nicole Mideo and Matt Osmond.
In my work, I combine mathematical modeling, comparative genomics, computational statistics, and other tools to answer questions in biology. My interests include causes and consequences of variation in recombination; viral evolution; zoonotic spillover emergence, i.e., the process by which animal pathogens jump species boundaries to infect and transmit between humans; and inference from genomic data. My current work combines several of these interests. For example, in one of my PhD chapters, I develop theory to predict in what host taxa (e.g., short- vs long- lived species) recombination between pathogen genotypes is most extensive, and test predictions of the theory using HPAI sequence data. In another, I develop a null model for the evolution of the recombination landscape (i.e., the probability distribution of crossovers along a focal chromosome) and use this theory to quantify how fast recombination landscapes are evolving in the wild. Outside of science, I enjoy spending time outdoors, traveling, reading, podcasts,
classical FM, and exploring the many neighborhoods and coffee shops of Toronto!
If you want to learn more about me or what I am up to, shoot me an email or check out my CV!
