About Me

(in about 509 words)

Intro

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying biomedical engineering and the contribution of biomechanics to the development of myopia (nearsightedness). I am a natural problem solver and love learning new skillsets and frameworks. In line with this, I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary problems at the interface of engineering, computational/statistical methods, and biology. If you think I can be helpful to you or would like to meet me, please feel free to get in touch.

Currently

Under the mentorship of Dr. Machelle Pardue and Dr. Ross Ethier, I developed techniques to better utilize the mouse in the study of ocular biomechanics (Dr. Ethier). Applying these techniques to the study of myopia (Dr. Pardue), I discovered that both visual and chemical (all-trans retinoic acid) stimuli profoundly influence the biomechanics of the mouse eye. These findings have formed the basis of a $600,000, 5-year R01 that will help elucidate the mechanistic pathways underlying the myopia epidemic.

In order to tackle my ambitious and exploratory dissertation, I discovered a passion programming. While I primarily use Python, I have cursory experience with React.js, LabView, Rust, and Fortran. I have contributed to a project facilitating the increased use of an exciting and rapidly maturing imaging modality, optical coherence tomography (OCT). I've also built a dozen public and in-house tools for manipulating/annotating OCT volumes, organizing terrabytes of animal data, using complex biomechanical models working with Nikon confocal data, and building pdf invoices.

Over the course of a PhD, one tends to generate a lot of data; I found myself drawn to analyzing/visualizing both my own data and the data of collaborators, where I was frequently brought in as a collaborator to make the most of a dataset. This has given me a good bredth of experience both working with data that I was involved in from the ground up (personally designing the experiments and obtaining the data) and gaining that same intimate familiarity directly from consultations with collaborators and from the data itself.

Some history

I was born and raised in the Northeast of the United States but have strong family ties to Canada, where I've spent a portion of nearly every summer of my life. I was fortunate to have some amazing teachers and role models growing up, from Lionville Elementary (Gale Soneson, who has been a positive influence on so many children) through highschool at Downingtown East (Michael Manganello, Jackie Rhoades, Carrie Thorpe, et al.). These teachers taught me how to think critically and sparked my interest in writing, math, science, and music. I started playing Ultimate frisbee in highschool and continued throughout my time at the University of South Carolina while completing my B.S. in Biomedical engineering, where I have made many of my lifelong friends (including one who has gone on to compete in in the 2022 World Games, helping the US win the gold medal).

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