Current research.

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University in the lab of Dr. Zhaohui "Steve" Qin in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. Although I am technically part of the Neuroscience Graduate Program, my research revolves around genomic data science, in particular, the following projects:
  • Using machine learning (ML) to identify pleiotropic expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) in multiple tissues and exons (multi-phenotype association tests).
 
  • Leveraging tissue-specific CpG sites to determine tissue-specific drivers in case-control studies.
 
  • Identifying risk variants and genetic drivers of cystic fibrosis with liver disease (side project).
 
  • Determining genetic drivers of motor neuron susceptibility in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
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  • Analyzing various methods used to characterize marker genes in single-cell RNA-sequencing data

You can feel free to browse some of my research works on the right. If you don't have access and would like to read the full text of a manuscript, please reach out to me personally!
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Dr. Qin's laboratory
Emory Neuroscience Graduate Program
My ORCID page
My Google Scholar page
My GitHub page

Yale University

In the summer of 2010, I worked at Yale University's Child Study Center under the supervision of Dr. Yuko Kataoka and Dr. Flora Vaccarino, the Principal Investigator, on a project on my own condition, Tourette Syndrome. I learned immunohistochemistry as well as a bit of stereology. My findings became incorporated into a larger study (a transcriptome analysis) that was published in 2016, and I was a co-author on the paper. You can check it out here.
Dr. Vaccarino's laboratory

UC Davis Medical Center

In the summer of 2012, I was an Edmondson Research Fellow at the UC Davis Medical Center working under Dr. Josh Miller and Dr. Ralph Green, the Principal Investigator, on a project on homocysteine in Alzheimer's disease. I learned about one-carbon metabolism and how to use high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). I attempted to correlate homocysteine measurements to Alzheimer's disease and dementia progression in my project.
The Hugh Edmondson internship program

The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research

In the summer of 2015, I worked at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research under the supervision of Dr. Eric Chang. I used image analysis software to compare DTI (diffusion tensor imaging) white matter integrity to labeled fiber tracts in CLARITY whole brains. CLARITY is a relatively new technique that allows the investigator to make the mouse brain transparent, and it allows for greater resolution imaging and for molecular phenotyping of neuronal circuits. I was a co-author on the conference abstract.
The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research homepage

Emory University

I enrolled in Emory University's Neuroscience Graduate Program in Summer 2017. All students are required to complete at least three "rotation" projects in different labs.

For my first rotation project, I worked under Dr. Chad Hales in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease investigating the aggregation properties of certain candidate proteins in post-mortem cases of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The prevalence of FTD is about 10-15 cases per 100,000 people, and it is a neurodegenerative disorder, meaning that neurons in the brain progressively die until the person can no longer function on their own. We took a proteomic data set of enriched insoluble proteins and conducted an extensive literature review to determine which proteins warranted further investigation.

For my second rotation project, I worked under Dr. Brad Pearce in the Department of Epidemiology investigating sex differences in physiological predictors of aggression. I was tasked with taking an MPH thesis and condensing it into a publishable manuscript. The thesis project looked at how changes in fear-potentiated acoustic startle, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability were correlated with self-reported aggression scores. Although the rotation is technically over, the manuscript is still being polished.
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For my third rotation project, I worked under Dr. Jennifer Mulle and Dr. Joseph Cubells in the Department of Human Genetics investigating the neuronal phenotype of a rare chromosomal microdeletion called the 3q29 deletion syndrome. This deletion of 22 protein-coding genes on the long arm of chromosome 3 is considered a copy number variant and confers a 40-fold increased risk for schizophrenia and is associated with other cognitive phenotypes.
Dr. Hales' laboratory