I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign largely under the guidance of Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese. I am interested in a broad range of biological phenomena with emphasis on microbiology, ecology, and evolution. Part of my focus has been examining the role of collective effects and emergent properties in biological systems, with particular interest in the role of gene transfers and mobile genetic elements such as viruses, transposons, and plasmids.

I received my Ph.D. working under Ralf Bundschuh in the Department of Physics at Ohio State University. My thesis work focused on the significance assessment of sequence alignments, but also included ties to a theoretical physical system known as the asymmetric exclusion process. At Ohio State, I also worked with a team on an alignment tool known as Hybrid PSI-BLAST that uses probabilitistic scoring in order to determine homology scores.