About

Hi and welcome!

I study how pathogens evolve and spread using a combination of genomics and mathematical modeling approaches. The goals of my research are to inform public health and advance basic science. I am particularly interested in collaborating and capacity-building in international low-resource settings.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Yonatan Grad in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. I study how bacterial pathogens evolve in response to pressures from the host immune system and how this affects pathogen transmission. I also assess the equitability of disease surveillance methods.

I completed my PhD with Dr. Oskar Hallatschek at UC Berkeley, where I studied the role of spatial structure in microbial evolution and developed methods to infer genetic drift from experimental and pathogen surveillance data.

I was a National Science Policy Network Scholar-in-Residence with the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy (now the One Health Trust), where I contributed to policy briefs on national action plans on antimicrobial resistance in Mali, Kenya, and Malawi. I am also passionate about science communication and outreach. I regularly give talks and write for a general public audience.

I completed my undergraduate degree in physics, where I did research in astronomy, atomic, molecular, and optical physics, and condensed matter physics. Before starting my PhD, I spent a year developing an affordable science teaching lab model in Rwanda.

I am always excited to talk about, learn about, and collaborate on any of these topics, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to chat!