About

I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Biomathematics Graduate Program at North Carolina State University. I am a Genetics and Genomics Scholar, as well as a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. I received a B.S. in Mathematics with highest honors from the University of Maine in 2020 (my undergraduate thesis can be found here). I grew up in Auburn, ME where I developed a fascination for infectious diseases and mathematics, although I spent the first years at my undergraduate institution studying to become a civil engineer! Eventually, I committed myself to a degree in mathematics after my REU experience at the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute at Arizona State University, and a grant project I worked on with Prof. David Hiebeler. This is also around the time when I became interested in programming to assist in some of my computational-oriented work, developing advanced knowledge in R, MATLAB, and NetLogo, to name a few.

This website is a mishmash of some of the things I've been up to, including past and current projects, presentations, etc. I will also occasionally make a blog post every so often about some of the things I find interesting. These topics tend to be more general and don't always have to do with epidemiology. Fair warning: the webpages on this site may look a little funky if you have an AdBlocker enabled.

Research Interests

Broadly speaking, my research interests are in the mathematical modeling of biological systems, specifically those concerning the spread and control of infectious diseases. As an undergraduate, my formal projects consisted of researching metapopulation analogues of superspreaders, comparing control strategies for the nosocomial transmission of MRSA, applications of topological concepts to aid in the diagnosis of breast cancer, developing a mathematical model of the opioid epidemic, some work modeling simple populations over heterogeneous landscapes, and many more.

As a graduate student, my research has become much more interdisciplinary, but primarily concerns methods of genetic biocontrol, specifically gene drives. Gene drives are any natural or artifical mechanism of spreading a gene into a target population. These genes can affect desirable changes, such as creating pathogen-resistant mosquitoes, or impose a fitness cost capable of suppressing or even eradicating a target population. However, while revolutionary, this technology is still in its infancy, and technological development relies on mathematical and computational models to understand how it will behave in the wild.

I am advised by Alun Lloyd and co-advised by Fred Gould.