I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Alberto Stolfi’s lab at Georgia Institute of Technology.
We use Ciona intestinalis, a simple invertebrate, to ask questions about the development of the nervous system.
Ciona has a compact genome and a simple nervous system, and it’s also easily genetically tractable through
CRISPR, which makes it a great system for such inquiries.
I’m interested in how the nervous system came to be, both from developmental and evolutionary perspectives,
as well as in regeneration and age-related neurodegeneration which was the topic of my doctoral dissertation
completed at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. I also enjoy bioinformatics and writing programs
that assist in everyday science-making. Finally, I’m also interested in how we can use synthetic biology,
deep learning and simulations to study neural development.