Margaret Turner Email and Phone Number

Designed and developed an R package for manipulating large relational tables of biological data under the supervision of Dr. Kris Sankaran.

Teach undergraduate life-sciences students exploratory data analysis and statistical methodology using R, both in one-on-one (office hours) and lecture (discussion sections) settings.

Partnered with senior engineer to re-engineer business-critical knowledge graph. Extended for detailed node properties and larger-than-memory data sources. Orchestrated steps and Dockerized code to run DAGs in AWS Batch and deploy on company’s Neo4j database. Compared AWS Batch and Prefect for workflow orchestration.Processed over 90 GBs of natural language parsed biological (PubMed) data using Dask (parallelized/distributed computing). Incorporated this data into 25 million new edges for the knowledge graph. Quantified strength between biological concepts using nPMI. Presented business logic and scaling strategy to data science team.Worked directly with the VP of Drug Discovery to scope and define product for finding substructures in natural products. Implemented Python API using rdkit to find substructures, implemented JavaScript front-end for UI, deployed app on company intranet. Worked together with computational biologists to identify sources with relevant biological information for analyses. Selected to present at all-hands.

As lab manager: Oversaw budget and inventory of the lab. Ensured compliance with regulations and SOPs. Managed colony of 1,000 transgenic mice. Designed and implemented data collection strategy for mouse breeding analytics.As RA: Designed, performed, and analyzed experiments using a variety of molecular biology and cell culture assays as well as murine disease models.

Returned to Dr. Nowarski's lab through the Cornell College Fellows Program as the Bahnick Fellow in Immunology Research.Used in vivo models of systemic inflammation in transgenic mice to probe cytokine signalling pathways.Wrote and defended honors thesis based on this work: "Wild-Type and Il18bp-Mutant Mice are Equally Susceptible to Gram-Negative Bacteremia: Implications for IL-18BP Signaling in Sepsis.”

Selected to study immunology at Harvard Medical School through research (mentored by Dr. Roni Nowarski), faculty lectures, and PhD-student-led workshops.Worked in Dr. Nowarski's lab to optimize protocols (including western blot and experimental colitis), maintain an extensive transgenic mouse colony, and assist in experimental studies.Presented findings from this research at the Harvard Immunology SURP Symposium at the end of the internship as well as at the 2019 Cornell College Student Symposium.

In Dr. MyPhuong Le's lab, I used a xanthine oxidase assay to characterize the antioxidant potential of dozens of botanical peptides. The characterization of these peptides is key to Dr. Le's efforts in identifying promising peptides for use as targeted therapeutics with the specific goal of treating pulmonary hypertension.