Computational Biologist, HudsonAlpha Institute For Biotechnology

I’m a recent transplant to the Huntsville area. I earned my B.S. in Bioinformatics from Virginia Commonwealth University and my Ph.D. in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology from UNC Charlotte where I studied oat genomics. In the summer of 2017, I attended the CROPS Conference hosted by HudsonAlpha and fell in love with the Institute and the area. I moved to the area and started at HudsonAlpha in September 2019.

I work in the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center where we specialize in producing high-quality genomic data for complex genomes. I am a Computational Biologist and my job is building plant genomes to explore natural plant diversity by figuring out the order of the DNA sequence in plant species. I use data from various DNA sequencing technologies to piece together large pieces of DNA. It’s like a DNA puzzle! I work with a supportive, collaborative team, which is great. I love that no two genome builds are the same, so every day is different.