My thesis examines the role of interplay between metabolism and epigenetics in the context of microglia immune response. My goal is to be able to understand chronic exposure phenotypes in microglia and manipulate them to prevent the induction of disease-associated phenotypes.

In-silico analysis of RNA folding for intergenic internal ribosome entry site structures in Dicistroviridae. Used bioinformatics tools to predict sequence alignment (JalView, AliView) and structure (RNA2Drawer, mFold, ViennaRNA package) and predict the presence of identified structures in other genomic sequences (Infernal). Gained experience in bioinformatics programs and programming languages including C++, Python, and Perl.

In-silico based research with the objective of determining the role of specific miRNA in the developing cerebellum. Worked with bioinformatics tools including miRanda, TargetScan and R (v3.6) to analyze and predict the targets of miRNAs that have high relative expression in the murine cerebellum during development. Work done in this project contributed to ongoing research with RNA-sequencing to determine the impact of the identified miRNAs on transcription related genes.

Contributed to experiments studying proteostasis in yeast and mammalian cell lines. Gained training in flow cytometry, maintaining mammalian cell culture and various biochemistry assays.