
Currently, I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in Dr. John Tuthill’s lab at the University of Washington, and plan to graduate Fall 2025. I am a 2018 UC Santa Cruz alum (go slugs). For two years following my undergraduate career, I worked as a research specialist at the University of Pennsylvania in Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor’s Lab. I developed new, more objective assays, and computational tools to assess acute and chronic pain states in rodent models.
Now, in my graduate career, I hope to develop a strategy to delineate neuronal pathways downstream of Drosophila nociceptors that govern aspects of aversive escape behaviors via optogenetic activation experiments, precise genetic silencing techniques, single-cell RNA sequencing analyses, and comprehensive neural EM circuit reconstruction
(staining of ppk-Gal4, Taken by: Bryan Lim (Feng Wei Yu’s Lab)
Notable graduate awards:
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship (2022)
- NSFGRFP Honorable Mention, Life Sciences - Neurosciences (2022)
- NIH T32 Predoctoral Training Program in the Neurosciences (2020-21)