I joined MIT in February 2012. Previously, I was a PhD student at the University of Toronto since September of 2006, working on deciphering the evolution of gene expression and function for genes present in the vertebrate lineage of organisms.

Before that, I was a Masters student in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, working under the supervision of Dr. Shoshana Wodak. We mainly worked on developing better discriminative models for identifying transcription factor binding sites in yeast, and made some interesting notes about common properties among the false positive predictions. I also did some side work modeling protein structures for Dr. Christine Bear, at the Hospital for Sick Children.

My undergraduate degree is from the University of Waterloo, in Computer Science with a Bioinformatics specialization. I was fortunate and had the opportunity to conduct undergraduate research in a few labs:

• Jurisica lab @ University of Toronto: Methods for identifying optimal conditions for protein crystallography, given high throughput screening experiments.
• Steipe lab @ University of Toronto: Software development for the identification of structural motifs in non-redundant structure databases.
• Sun Centre of Excellence for Visual Genomics @ University of Calgary: Immersive virtual reality environments for protein structure visualization.
• UBC Bioinformatics Centre @ UBC: Application of machine learning for automated genome annotation systems.