Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, I moved to Boston to attend Harvard College, where I studied biomedical engineering and conducted research at the Wyss Institute in Neel Joshi’s lab. My research focused on engineering the extracellular matrix of probiotic bacteria to target their colonization within the GI tract. After graduating in 2015, I worked as a research assistant in Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at MIT studying methods to engineer liver tissue for toxicology screening, disease modeling, and transplantation. I joined the MD/PhD Program at Columbia in 2017 and became a full time member of the GVN lab after completing two years of medical school. In the lab, I work on the cardiac team, and I am using iPSC-derived cardiac tissue models to study ischemic heart disease.
MD/PhD Student