I study how cancer starts. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children's Hospital, I'm interested in the cellular and evolutionary processes involved in the genesis of tumors from histologically normal tissue, using transgenic melanoma-prone zebrafish and computational methods from dynamical systems. My work is motivated by a firm belief that disease prevention is better than treatment, and that the future of cancer prevention depends on a more precise understanding of how malignancies arise from healthy cells and tissue. My research is 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.

I have always had an affinity for integrating experiment and computation to work on problems in biology and disease. Before starting my postdoc, I did my PhD at MIT in Forest White's lab where I studied the signaling pathways that allow tumor cells to survive small-molecule targeted therapies (Flower et al. Cell Syst. 2025). During graduate school I taught and led grading for an MIT course on mathematical modeling of biomolecular systems, and I spent a summer working on immuno-oncology efforts as a computational biology intern at BioNTech US. Before graduate school, I was a first-gen undergrad in my home state at the University of Connecticut (go Huskies!) where I was introduced to oncology and bioinformatics in Pramod Srivastava's lab at the UConn Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center. I also worked in Ki Chon's group in the biomedical engineering department on physiological signal processing, and I interned at the NIH in Mark Knepper's lab where I worked on new integrative methods to identify microproteins in renal tissue. I received a Goldwater Scholarship in 2016 and a graduate fellowship from the MIT Ludwig Center in 2022 and 2023. My work is currently supported by a fellowship from the Department of Data Science and the Center for Cancer Evolution at Dana-Farber.