I am a computer scientist and bioinformatician with experience in academia and the biotechnology industry.

My teaching is guided by the idea that computer science is the new math—an increasingly fundamental tool for problem solving across the sciences. I enjoy teaching computer science and developing computer science courses that make computing accessible and useful to students across disciplines. Since 2018, I have had the privilege of teaching 6,375 students in these computer science courses for non-majors.

My research focuses on using computers to analyze data, with an emphasis on sequence data and bioinformatics. I enjoy collaborating on diverse interdisciplinary projects where bioinformatics and computational methods play a central role.

My interdisciplinary graduate studies began in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, where I became interested in using computers to analyze large datasets—taking courses on web search from Google founders and fellow grad students Brin and Page and computational biology with Stanford Medical School faculty. This led me to the vibrant Silicon Valley biotech industry, where I worked as a Principal Bioinformatics Scientist at Incyte, and ultimately back to UC Davis Computer Science to work with Dan Gusfield, where I obtained my Ph.D. on Computational Methods for Population Genomics.