Interests

• Computational Biology
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics
• Molecular Biology

Projects

As an undergraduate researcher in Rob Carey’s lab at Lebanon Valley College, I helped elucidate the evolutionary history of expansins in the lycophyte Selaginella moellendorffii.

Following graduation I received a post-baccalaureate intramural training award (IRTA) to work in the lab of Stephen Leppla at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. Here I worked on projects related to protein production and genome engineering using an avirulent strain of Bacillus anthracis.

In 2014, I joined Dan Cosgrove’s lab at Penn State University, again focusing on expansin evolution. I have worked on several projects during graduate school, including:

• in vitro evolution of cellulose binding module 63 using phage display
• Evolution of expansin superfamilies in aquatic plants
• Targeted knock out of expansin genes in Arabidopsis thaliana by CRISPR/Cas9

Presenting my research at Penn State’s Plant Biology Seminar Series