Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, California
I am studying genetic determinants of non-genetic variability, or “noise,” in gene expression using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
I started college fully intending to become a physician. However, an excellent first-year interdisciplinary course exposed me to the excitement of research science, and demonstrated the power/utility of using tools from one discipline to study problems in another. I pursued a degree in physics, with the intention of applying the quantitative tools and techniques that I had learned to study biology.
My graduate studies were supervised by both Pam Silver, a molecular and cellular biologist, and Fritz Roth, a statistician and computational biologist. Their joint tutelage allowed me not only to learn fundamental molecular biology and genomics, but also how to analyze data I generated in high-throughput and computational studies. My post-doctoral research on noise in gene expression provides another opportunity to apply mathematical and computational techniques to high-throughput datasets that I am collecting myself. I hope that these studies will provide new insight into problems as fundamental