What is your academic background? What research experience did you have before grad school?

I received a BA in Biochemistry: Cell and Molecular Biology from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa in 2014. I did a lot of internships at different plant genetics organizations, including DuPont-Pioneer, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and the USDA. There I realized that developing new tools and algorithms to leverage high-throughput biological data is an ever-growing, important need in biology.

What is your research area and why is it exciting?

My research areas are in protein biology, evolution, and synthetic biology. The Marks lab leverages publicly available sequence data to make probabilistic models of biological sequences. These models can predict the effects of mutations, find structure from sequences, and be used to generate new examples of sequences. I find it exciting to think of new ways to leverage same data for new purposes and find novel questions to apply these methods to.

What advice would you give to college students who are interested in a PhD in genomics/bioinformatics?

I would encourage students to take as many math/statistics courses as possible while still focusing on basic biology. Mathematics and statistics provides a researcher with useful, powerful tools to analyze data and leverage computational analysis to its full extent, but understanding the fundamentals of the questions facing biology and the purpose of analysis is even more important.