I study how cancer starts. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital, I use zebrafish melanoma models and computational approaches to investigate the role of cell state plasticity in early tumorigenesis. My work is jointly supervised by Franziska Michor and Leonard Zon, and I am affiliated with the departments of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Biostatistics at Harvard University.

Hailing from northwest Connecticut, I earned my BSE in biomedical engineering at the University of Connecticut (go Huskies!) where, as a first-gen undergraduate, I was initially exposed to cancer research and computational biology under Pramod Srivastava and Sahar Al Seesi at UConn's Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center; I also worked with Ki Chon on physiological signal processing in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. I earned my PhD in computational and systems biology at MIT, where my thesis work was supervised by Forest White at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. In my dissertation, I studied the cell-intrinsic signaling events that allow tumor cells to blunt the effects of several FDA-approved kinase inhibitor therapies, using mass spectrometry-based proteomics and multivariate statistical methods applied to human cancer cell line models; this work uncovered several drug combinations that are effective in preclinical models of lung cancer and melanoma. Throughout my PhD I was a teaching assistant and head grader for an undergraduate MIT course on mathematical modeling of biomolecular systems (20.320); I also spent some time as a research intern at NIH during undergrad and at BioNTech US during graduate school. I was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in 2016 and a graduate fellowship from the MIT Ludwig Center in 2021 and 2022. My work is currently supported by the Department of Data Science and the Center for Cancer Evolution at Dana-Farber.