Investigating neurodegenerative disease using human biobank data, including blood biomarkers, proteomics, genomics, electronic health records, and methods from machine learning and statistical modeling in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chirag Patel's lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School working on neurodegenerative disease using human biobank data including blood biomarkers (e.g., pTau-217), amyloid-PET and other types of brain imaging, cerebrospinal fluid, genomics, proteomics, electronic health records, and methods from machine learning and statistical modeling.
Tufts University (2023): Postdoctoral Fellow in Michael Levin's lab working on single-cell genomics and calcium imaging analysis.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (2022): Earned PhD in
Yasmin Hurd's lab, supported by
F31 (NIDA) and
T32 (NIGMS) National Research Service Awards. Worked at the interface of
genomics, machine learning, and behavioral neuroscience to understand the
molecular underpinnings of
opioid use disorder. I also wrote a snapshot on opioid abuse neurobiology,
studied the effects of
prenatal cannabis exposure on motivation and the epigenetics of the nucleus accumbens, and published essays on the
intersection of metascience and neuroscience and
common pitfalls of clinical machine learning.
From 2017-2018, I was a rotation student in Avi Ma’ayan’s lab and developed machine learning algorithms to predict diagnosis of substance use disorders using electronic medical records.
National Institute on Drug Abuse (2015-2017): Postbac in Michael Michaelides' lab on an Intramural Research Training Award. Worked on projects including the decoding of natural scenes from calcium imaging data curated by the Allen Institute, DREADD actuator metabolism, the effects of zinc on on cocaine-seeking, the effects of obesity on GPCR signaling in the striatum, and a textbook chapter on neuroimaging similarities between substance use and overeating disorders.
Florida Atlantic University (2014): B.S. in Neuroscience & Behavior with Minor in Psychology. Pursued research in coordination dynamics in J. A. Scott Kelso's lab and neural circuits underlying cognitive behaviors in Robert Vertes' lab.
In high-dimensional data settings, we propose randomly chosen feature sets of varying sizes as simple and effective benchmarks for evaluating the performance of data-driven machine learning models.
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Identified Shisa7 as a novel biomarker for opioid use disorder via a machine learning approach with human brain RNA-seq and validated it in a translational rodent model.
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