I am a biologist interested in developing therapeutics that improve human health.
Currently, I work in the drug development group at Schrödinger as a biologist, enabling drug discovery programs in diverse disease areas and analyzing new targets for Schrödinger's unique physics-based computational modeling platform. Between 2018-2020, I worked at Inzen Therapeutics, a small biotech startup focused on developing drugs that manipulate cell death.
Prior to Inzen, I received a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Stanford University for work in Ellen Yeh’s lab. There I focused on identifying novel antimalarials that target the malaria parasite’s unusual and mysterious apicoplast organelle. This work led to four publications, one of which was featured in a BugBitten blog post! Towards the end of graduate school, I interned at Insight Data Science to develop algorithms that predict bacterial contamination in ocean water. As someone who grew up in Hawaii, this topic was close to my heart.
Much of my initial interest in science can be credited to my experience as an undergraduate in David Wemmer’s lab at UC Berkeley, where I used single-molecule optical tweezers and NMR to study the force-dependent molecular mechanisms of the bacterial transcription factor, sigma54. As a young scientist, I became hooked on the endless and diverse ways in which cells sense and regulate themselves and their environment. This subject continues to inspire me to this day.