Accomplished supervisor's #1 priority in just 2.5 months by completing genomics research that served as the foundation for a new, successful grant proposal worth $2.1M over 5 years• Built a next-generation sequencing (NGS) pipeline from scratch and characterized 3 billion RNA-sequencing reads from 72 rats using bash scripting, a high performance computing cluster configured with SLURM, and literature-recommended transcriptomic tools• Discovered cancer-related gene expression trends in a multi-factor liver transcriptome study (time, diet, and an environmental toxin) using R, DESeq2, and gene set analysis with KEGG pathways• Assisted in identifying new avenues for research, forming hypotheses, and writing/editing proposal• Generated visualizations to quickly and simply convey research results in support of the proposal• Ensured accessibility for further analysis to researchers with no programming experience by simplifying calculated results to tractable Excel spreadsheetsEnsured reproducibility with git, Rmarkdown, and extensive documentationCompleted computationally-intensive tasks needed to characterize transcriptional changes in rat gut bacteria (microbiome) and make downstream analyses by other researchers possible• Generated a de novo metatranscriptome with 2.5M transcripts covering 95% of RNA-sequencing reads using bash scripting, high performance computing (HPC), and Trinity• Established and customized an annotation pipeline to use DIAMOND and hmmsearch (HMMER), reducing computation time from weeks to days (compared to defaults: BLAST+ and hmmscan)• Wrote custom Perl scripts to extract, transform, and load a 200Gb UniRef90 xml file into an SQL database which increased downstream transcript annotation from 46 to 77%

• Taught "Introduction to Microbiology for Allied Health Students" (online) and "Genetics Lab" to diverse group of students• Collaborated with team of three professors to improve Genetics Laboratory course design and manual, improving organization and clarity while reducing manual length