Abigail Thorpe

Graduate Rotation Student

Joined Summer 2021

I am a graduate student in the Genome Sciences department at the University of Washington. I have a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the George Washington University in Washington, DC. As an undergraduate student, I interned in Dr. John Tsang’s group in the NIAID Laboratory of Immune System Biology, where I developed software to support flu vaccine studies. For my senior design project, I worked under Dr. Guillermo Gutierrez at GW Hospital and used respiratory rate data from mechanical ventilators to monitor intubated patients.

After completing my bachelor’s degree in 2017, I spent three years as a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, MD. My first year was spent working with Dr. Jordan Meier at the Chemical Biology Laboratory, where I developed new methods for detecting and sequencing RNA modifications. I then joined Dr. Brandon Keele’s group in the AIDS and Cancer Virus Program, using barcoded immunodeficiency viruses to monitor and track infection in Rhesus macaques.

I am now a first year PhD student in the Genome Sciences department. I have broad interests in bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, epigenetics, and gene regulation. What most captivates me is new genomic methods and the unique biological questions they can answer.