Postdoctoral researcher in the Moriarity and Webber lab studying induced pluripotent stem cell models of immune cell-tumor interactions. Fellow on the NIH T32 in Translational and Genomic Pediatric Cancer Epidemiology.

I completed my Ph.D thesis in Dr. Richard Vile’s laboratory in the Department of Molecular Medicine and the Immunology Department. Dr. Vile’s lab focuses on oncolytic virus therapy and adoptive cell therapy in cancer. My Ph.D thesis focuses on tumor escape from frontline therapies, and a mechanism that leads to escape. The primary techniques that I use in Dr. Vile's laboratory are RT-qPCR, PCR, Western blotting, and flow cytometry. I was awarded an F31 grant from the NIH in February 2022 partially funding my thesis work.

I worked in Dr. Jeniffer Hernandez's immunology laboratory at Keck Graduate Institute, a member of the Claremont University Consortium. I studied the expression of GPR65, a G protein coupled receptor, in TH17 cells, and the role of GPR65 in the CREB/CRTC2 pathway. I showed that blocking GPR65 receptor via a known GPR65 antagonist leads to a concentration-dependent decrease in GPR65 mRNA expression, which indicates that CREB is downstream of GPR65, and a feedback loop between GPR65 and the CREB/CRTC2 pathway exists.The primary techniques that I used in the Hernandez laboratory were RT-qPCR and Western blot. I completed a written thesis detailing my work in May 2019, and presented my work orally to the Pomona College Department of Biology in May 2019.

I worked in Dr. Larry Pease's lab as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at the Mayo Clinic. I worked on two projects in Dr. Pease's lab. The first project, entitled "Intra-Lymph Node Transduction of Chimeric Antigen Receptors Coupled with Allogenic Activation of CTLs," focused on activating T cells and transducing them to CARs in vivo. The second project, entitled "Breaking Central Tolerance: Inducing Cross-Reactive Cytolytic T Cells on Self-Peptide-MHC," focused on breaking tolerance to a chicken egg antigen in a mouse strain that was tolerized to the chicken egg antigen.Techniques I frequently used in Dr. Pease's lab included flow cytometry, ELISAs. I gained experience working with mice and extracting their organs, including their spleens and pancreata.

I worked in Dr. Stephen Diggle's lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. My project focused on the diversity of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria in the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. I studied the antibiotic resistance levels of combined cultures of two or more P. aeruignosa isolates compared to single isolates in the presence of public resistance and private resistance antibiotics. We conducted liquid culture antibiotic resistance tests - using kinetic growth and colony forming unit data. Through this program, I gained strong research methodology and data analysis experience.