Education

BS: Bioinformatics, Rochester Institute of Technology
PhD: Bioinformatics, University of Delaware

Research Interests

Virus detection and subsequent removal during biotherapeutic protein and vaccine production is of critical importance to ensure the final therapeutic product is free from any possible viral contamination. Viral detection using next generation sequencing (NGS) approaches have been proposed to replace or complement traditional in vitro and in vivo virus testing. However, further investigation into the bioinformatics methods used to classify viral sequencing reads is needed. I am currently testing several rapid viral metagenomics approaches on simulated NGS datasets and existing datasets from virus spike-in studies. The aim is to find an approach with high specificity and sensitivity, but also has speed, space, and memory usage requirements that would be appropriate for a web-based tool.