Chief Technology Officer at Firstlook AI

Genteract is a personalized medicine company that finds and clinically tests new ways to help people with chronic conditions like migraines through modification of the their lifestyle based on their genetic information.

My dissertation research focused on the regulation of Telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the ends of chromosomes that limit the number of times that cells can divide. Telomerase is an attractive target for cancer therapy because very few of the body's normal cells express Telomerase, but nearly all cancers depend on it for survival. During my dissertation work, I identified over forty proteins involved in Telomerase regulation, discovered that two genetic disorders in humans also include defects in Telomere biology, and re-purposed an existing cancer drug for inhibition of Telomerase in both xenograft models as well as in samples from a phase II clinical trial.

Competitive paid internship in genomics, working on locating and characterizing a tumor suppressor protein in the 1p22 region, following a genome-wide association study (GWAS).-Designed primers and performed Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) followed by Sanger Sequencing on candidate genes in the chromosomal region.-Identified several hundred novel Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in human populations, uploaded to dbSNP.-Presented findings in scientific poster format at the conclusion of each summer.Went through the competitive application process in both 2007 and 2008; the internship lasted from June 2007-August 2007, and then from June 2008-August 2008, in between the Sophomore and Junior year (2007), or Junior and Senior year (2008) of undergraduate study.