I am a fourth year PhD student in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois, working with Tandy Warnow. Earlier I completed my MS in Computer Science at UIUC and was named a Siebel Scholar class of 2022, and received an honorable mention for the NSF-GRFP. Since starting my PhD I have continued work under a SURGE Fellowship, the Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship, and the Debra and Ira Cohen Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science.

I do applied algorithms research in two different areas: network science and computational biology.

My MS degree contributed the SCAMPP method for phylogenetic placement (adding sequences into a phylogenetic tree) under maximum likelihood. My PhD work has developed Batch-SCAMPP, an improved version of SCAMPP designed for placing thousands to millions of sequences into the phylogenetic tree. I have also co-developed TIPP3, a new method for abundance profiling of reads in microbiome samples, which has superior accuracy to all current methods under most conditions. I work on the problem of community detection, also known as clustering, on large networks, where I have contributed a method for core-periphery community detection (IKC, or Iterative k-core clustering) and an ensemble method (FastEnsemble) for community detection. I am currently working on evaluating TIPP3 for taxon presence/absence in microbial data and a new method for adding sequences into multiple sequence alignments.