COA Alumni

14

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

B.C. Cancer Research Agency’s Genome Science Centre

I recently left my position of four years as a research assistant at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Bar Harbor, and moved to Vancouver to start a Ph.D. in Genome Science and Technology at the University of British Columbia. Starting January 2019, I will be at the B.C. Cancer Research Agency’s Genome Science Centre conducting research into the genetics of oligodendroglioma to understand how we can improve patients’ survival outcomes.

I am still exploring Vancouver and trying to get my bearings here. While I was in Bar Harbor I became a facilitator at Girls Who Code with Megan McOsker, a local high school teacher. We wanted to change the male-dominated landscape that we currently see in the IT industry and provide middle school girls a supportive environment where they can gain confidence in coding. As for family updates, I am engaged to the lovely Nicole Dyregrov who also lives here in Vancouver with me and our 2 cats Jonas and Zara. She also works at the B.C. Cancer Agenc, on the clinical side as an oncology registered nurse.

University of Maine

2018

P.S.M. Bioinformatics

My senior project was conducted at JAX, studying how a gene named Aspa played a role in Chronic Kidney Disease. I took a job at JAX when I graduated to continue this work.

I did three different internships for each summer that I was at COA. First I worked with Dr. Carla Guenther at the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries on collecting data from local scallop fishermen throughout Downeast Maine, to collaboratively determine the best policy to regulate the scallop fishery. For the second summer, I worked with Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Dr. Bram Lutton’s lab. We used little skates to study cellular proliferation in the epigonal organ, which in humans translates to understanding hematopoiesis in the bone marrow to improve the outcomes of bone marrow transplantation. Finally, my third internship was at JAX with Dr. Ron Korstanje, where I started my work in Aspa, which led to my senior project.

Having been exposed to human ecology, I think, made me a more well-rounded person than
the typical research assistant at JAX. It made me more aware of the interconnection of biological
processes and techniques within our realm of science. I was able to see how powerful it was
for wet-lab scientists to work well and understand the process that is undertaken by dry-lab
scientists (computer-based) and vice versa. This is also where I identified a gap, where many
wet-lab and dry-lab scientists did not fully comprehend each other, which is why I decided to
pursue a masters in bioinformatics to become a “translator” between these two worlds.