The past year has been busy! From teaching and developing more workshops here in the Informatics Group (and helping to update the website!), to seeing friends and showing a poster about PhyloAcc at this year's TAGC in Washington D.C, and to finishing up several projects.
On top of that, I just welcomed my son, Wesley, into the world on June 20! With that being said, I'll be on leave for the next few months to get to know him.
It was great to see old friends and meet new people at the Evolution 2023 meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico!
I gave a talk on the effects of divergence on the effectiveness of read mapping and subsequent variant calling. You can check out the slides from my talk here.
I helped teach a series of workshops over 4 weeks in March with my colleagues in the Informatics Group here at Harvard. We covered topics ranging from an introduction to the R programming language and the tidyverse, to common bioinformatics files and tools, and working with conda environments and a HPC. I look forward to developing these workshops in the future, possibly into a full semester-long course.
ctober 31, 2022 I was happy to give a workshop this week demonstrating PhyloAcc in Prof. Scott Edwards' comparative genomics class.
After my talks in the spring, I launched a summer tour, giving talks and posters at multiple conferences! The tour dates were:
SMBE GS2 was really unique, focusing on Sustainability, Equity, and Efficiency in Computational Biology, which is something I'm really interested in and that our field now has the capability and need to focus on. I learned about some nice tools from Jason Grealey and colleagues (The carbon footprint of bioinformatics) like Green algorithms and GreenAlgorithms4HPC to quantify the energy use and carbon footprint of the programs we run.
You can check out the slides from my talks on the Publications & Talks page.
After moving to MA and settling in last semester, I'm looking forward to giving a couple seminars this spring. First, I'll be talking at the lunchtime seminar at the Museum of Comparative Zoology here at Harvard on March 21. Later that week, on March 25, I'll be talking about my work at UMass Lowell's weekly biology seminar. Thanks to Daren Card (MCZ) and Jessica Garb (UMass Lowell) for the invitations!
I'm also looking forward to presenting my work at some conferences this summer. More on that soon!
In September I taught at this year's online ConGen population genomics workshop. This year I taught two workshops.
I'm really grateful to be working with such great people!
This April I attended AABA's virtual meeting and gave a talk about primate mutation rates. I summarized all that we have learned about the rate at which mutations accumulate in primates, and how this changes for different types of mutations. Check out the slides here!
Importantly, at the beginning of July I started a position as a Bioinformatics Scientist at Harvard University! I'm really excited about this position because I'll have both the freedom to pursue research and the stability of a staff position. I'll be working in Tim Sackton's group on a range of comparative and population genomics questions and software development. For now, I'm working remotely still in Missoula, but will be moving to Cambridge in September, and I'm really looking forward to working with the scientists at Harvard!
In September, I will be giving a workshop on genome assembly with Ellie Armstrong at this year's online ConGen.
Earlier this summer I was awarded the Indiana University Graduate School Distinguished Ph.D. Disseratation award! I am so honored and excited to have been chosen for this award! The graduate school has since nominated my dissertation for the Council of Graduate Schools Distinguished Dissertation award.
On July 21, 2020 I will be giving a talk at the vitrual Arthropod Genomics Symposium regarding our recent publication of the i5K pilot project. I'll be summarizing our results from this broad comparative study.
Our paper regarding mutation rates in rhesus macaques was featured on Luddy School of Informatics news website! Great work led by Richard Wang.
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I was excited to be asked to talk about my dissertation work on mutation rates in primates at this year's AAPA meeting, however this meeting was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. Instead I will be uploading slides for this talk to their website in the near future.
I recently (Nov. 1, 2019) gave a CHALK talk to my colleagues here at the University of Montana about my reasearch (past and future). It was a great learning experience for me to give a talk in this format.
Jeff and I also recently (Nov. 10-13, 2019) visited the LSU Museum of Natural Science to discuss upcoming collaborations with rodent specialists Jake Esselstyn, Kevin Rowe, and Carl Hutter. This was a great opportunity to spend time with these scientists in the Museum and meet others at LSU!
On July 1, 2019 I successfully defended my dissertation! It is titled The causes of mutation and substitution rate variation in primates and is available open access at that link thanks to IUScholarWorks.
I have subsequently moved to the University of Montana in Missoula to start my postdoc work in Jeff Good's lab. Here I'll continue to work on some of the fundamental questions of phylogenetics and genome evolution using the great model system of murine rodents!
On September 5th, I'll be hosting the i5K webinar and discussing our work on the i5K pilot project to examine genome evolution across 76 species of Arthropods.
Check out the pre-print of the paper on bioRxiv!
I have been featured in an article on IU's IT News & Events for my use of the high-performance computing clusters to perform large-scale genomic analyses!
I will also be giving my talk about my work with the i5k project at Evolution this year in Portland. My talk is in the 'Phylogenomics 1' session at 8:30AM on Monday June 26.
I have been invited to speak at the Arthropod Genomics Symposium at Notre Dame University in June. I'll be talking about my work in the i5k initiative on large scale gene family analysis. My first invited talk!
I'll be giving a talk at this year's Evolution Meeting in Austin.
UPDATE: June 11, 2016 -- The title of my talk is "Gene tree reconciliation using MUL-trees resolves polyploidy events" and will be on Sunday June 19 at 9:15AM in the Phylogenetics methods development 3 symposium (MR5).
Check out the pre-print of the paper on bioRxiv!
I was recently featured in a spotlight on the IU School of Informatics website!
