Through the use of genetic sequencing technologies and statistical analyses, I elucidate how microbiomes are shaped by the factors of beetle evolutionary history, diet, and geography and investigate the role microbes play in the biosynthesis of defensive chemicals.To this end I employ a variety of techniques including:- The use of a dedicated remote Linux server on campus to process microbiome large datasets with bash, R, and python.- Dimensionality reduction techniques such as Principle Coordinates Analysis, and generation of dissimilarity matrices to analyze the high-dimensional (tens of thousands of columns) nature of microbial datasets.-RNA sequencing, bioinformatic assembly, and differential expression analysis to identify candidate genes in chemical biosynthesis.-Chemical analysis using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and linear mixed models resulting in finding the effect of microbial knockdown on defensive chemistry output.Mentored a team of undergraduates to scope experiments, wet-lab protocols, and hands on code writing/development in a collaborative and reproducible way.

Mentor undergraduates on academic and professional development. Topics include:1. Choosing a career path2. Goal setting3. Finding and applying to opportunities

Created lesson plans and led discussions for UC Berkeley classes.

For this research seminar series I recruited and scheduled speakers, as well as managed finances.

Developed experimentation pipelines to train and evaluate transformer models with Python and Luigi and communicated results with stakeholders to determine next steps in model architecture.Collaborated with domain experts to define success metrics for models in the medical-NLP space, building custom functions to score model outputs.

Organize and execute professional development events focused on transitioning to careers outside of academia for graduate students and postdocs. I focus on recruiting speakers from the tech sector in data science roles. Through people analytics of attendee demographics, survey responses, and comments, I helped to increase attendance 10-fold from 300 attendees to 3000 attendees for our annual conference leading to more opportunities for graduate students and postdocs both in and outside of UC Berkeley.

A fast-paced data science bootcamp covering a broad range of data science topics including data gathering, data preprocessing, classification, regression, time series forecasting, and neural networks all implemented in python.In the team project competition, our team won the 1st prize (out of 50 teams). We developed a model to decode acronyms/abbreviations in medical records. We achieved a 4% increase in validation accuracy with respect to published results in the literature. We used "reverse substitution" to generate custom training datasets to train different NLP models such as Electra and Bert. I connected the model developed in Pytorch to using Flask with custom HTML/CSS creating an intuitive user interface.

Served as a mentor for several programs including:• Bay Area Scientist in Schools - Teach lesson plans in elementary schools.• Be a Scientist - Lead a group of middle school science students through an experiment over • Oakland Goes Outdoors - Filmed and narrated a field biology expedition for Oakland students.• Nature and Environment Day Camp - Led a week-long outdoor adventure with the scouts to explore the environment, identify species, and conduct experiments.

-Team Lead for field surveys of terrestrial wildlife-Worked with the SCIENCE department to create company guides for identification protocols

-Leading teams in the field to sample insects, small mammals, plants, streams-Establishing plots using trimble. -Managed a lab for insect sample processing.

Conducted beetle, mosquito, tick, small mammal, plant, and stream surveys.

Removed noxious invasive weeds using chemical sprays and removed mining posts in a blue bird restoration project

Research project: Interactions of Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1) with p53 Under Genotoxic Conditions.-Received a student grant froM SUNY Oneonta to fund research-Isolated isoforms of HSF1