PhD Student
The route I took to become a Master’s student in the Levi Lab was fairly circuitous. A large swath of conservation land was my playground growing up and I was academically inclined toward quantitative pursuits but I took a detour through the art world before coming back to computer programming as a webmaster at a software development firm. After a time I decided to pursue something more meaningful so I returned to school and volunteered at the Eagle Creek Fish Hatchery and the Julia Butler Hansen Wildlife Refuge with their Columbian White- Tailed Deer Project. Everything came into place when I realized that I could use my computer programming and quantitative abilities to help protect and preserve the natural world.
That we can use code to develop methods to analyze genetic code is fascinating to me. Continued advancements in sequencing technologies have made complex genetic analyses accessible to resource-deprived wildlife organizations and it is my goal to facilitate wildlife management and conservation efforts by developing novel molecular methods to monitor wildlife.