About
I am interested in understanding the genetic and environmental mechanisms contributing to risk for developing psychiatric illness.
In my undergraduate and postgraduate work, I trained to understand psychiatric illness from the lens of cellular neuroscience and molecular genetics. How do the interactions of synaptic proteins affect how we think about rare and impactful autism spectrum disorders? How do genetic predisposition and life experiences interact to impact risk for schizophrenia? Exploring such questions was a key part of my training, in addition to dissecting these questions in a laboratory, using neurons in a dish.
In my PhD, I aspire to ask questions about genetics from a population-level perspective. Population genetics studies genetic variation within and between populations and can help us better understand the genetic changes associated with psychiatric illness. In my PhD, I aspire to explore how studying genetic variation across ancestral populations can give us insights into genetic predisposition that is shared across global populations.
Understanding genetic predisposition in this way could help us understand how to better diagnose and treat psychiatric illness.
Department: Human Genetics
Lab: