I am a first year PhD student in the MCB program at the University of Washington. I got my bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, where I majored in Pharmacology and Biomedical Toxicology. During my undergrad, I spent one year at Orion Pharma as an Assistant Researcher working on early phase drug development for castration-resistant prostate cancer. This experience sparked a desire in me to better understand prostate cancer biology to find novel drug targets. After graduation, I joined Dr. Andrew Hsieh’s lab at Fred Hutch as a Research Technician where I conceived and implemented key studies that uncovered how androgen receptor regulates the translation initiation of pro-proliferation mRNAs.