I am a first year PhD student in the Molecular and Cellular Biology program at the University of Washington. As an undergraduate and MA student at the University of Colorado Boulder, I studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. For my graduate research, I developed computational biology skills by analyzing whole-genome sequences to identify patterns of introgression between hybridizing chickadee species. After conducting research at the University of Colorado Boulder, I worked at a biotechnology company using microarray printing to develop potency assays for vaccine development. With a passion for computational biology, I am broadly interested in deepening my understanding of genetics and genomics by answering disease-related questions using genomic variants.

In the Ha Lab, I am interested in identifying structural genomic variants using sequence data from prostate cancer tumors and determining if using a more recent human reference genome (2013 GRCh38 versus 2022 T2T-CHM13) or different sequencing technology (short-read versus long-read) impacts the structural variants identified. Answering these questions will be informative for improving how we analyze cancer genomes.