Company:

Baylor College of Medicine

Current Position: 

Postdoctoral Research Associate,
Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology,
Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine,
Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital

Job duties: 

I work as the lead bioinformatician for the Aagaard lab, studying the microbiome surrounding pregnancy, birth, and infancy through metagenomic sequencing.

Impacts:

Our research broadens our understanding how microbial ecology and the environment impacts reproductive medicine, which has a direct impact on improving the outcomes associated with maternity and preterm birth.

What are you passionate about?

I am interested in the effects of the microbial ecology on a host/environmental microbiome. I am also interested in the computational biological aspect of medicine, and the analysis of large scale datasets in a high performance computing environment.
Finally I am working on the integration of amplicon and WGS sequencing into a hybrid pipeline that can deliver the benefits of PCR sensitivity for low biomass environment and WGS resolution. I also thing long read sequencing is amazing, and have experience working with nanopore read data.

Describe your educational history: 

I received both my B.S in Bioenvironmental Sciences (BESC) and PhD in Plant Pathology (PLPA) from the Plant Pathology and Microbiology (PLPM) department at Texas A&M University.

What advise would you give to the current Aggies interested in entering environmental industry? 

Identify the current and future needs of the industry, and be constantly adapting your skills to those needs.

If you were entering the environmental industry today, what area would you pursue? Why?

I personally think there is great opportunity and applicability in the data analysis. The beautiful thing about data science is that is crosses all industries and can be a valuable asset in areas as broad in range as bioinformatic processing to identifying Brownfield restoration services for potential high value real estate.