I’m a computational biologist and geneticist studying how the genome breaks, rearranges and misfires in cancer. My lab builds computational methods to find the structural changes in tumor DNA — large rearrangements, gene fusions and other genomic scrambling — and to figure out which of these changes are actually driving the disease, as opposed to just along for the ride.

I trained in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia, then spent several years at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the University of Chicago in 2017, where I’m now an Associate Professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and the Department of Human Genetics.

Much of my early work grew out of large, collaborative cancer genome sequencing projects, including The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes consortium, where I helped build tools to map thousands of tumor genomes and interpret the rearrangements within them.

These days my lab focuses on a few main threads: finding cancer-driving mutations hiding in the “non-coding” part of the genome — the majority of our DNA that doesn’t make protein but can still switch cancer genes on; understanding how collisions between DNA replication and transcription create damaging duplications in tumors; and studying what causes lung cancer in people who’ve never smoked.

I currently hold an R01 from the National Cancer Institute and have received honors including a Young Investigator Award from the Melanoma Research Alliance and a Lung Cancer Discovery Award from the American Lung Association.