In high school, I became very interested in biology and psychology, studying them independently and TAing classes for lower years. When debating over what to major in, I was excited to discover Northeastern University’s Behavioral Neuroscience program, which started as a combined biology/psychology degree.

I still jumped around a lot, between cognition, linguistics, learning and memory, and computer science, before going on my first coop (a full-time, 6 month internship between semsesters) at Harvard Medical School’s Datta Lab. There, I investigated the role of olfactoy neurons expressing the Ms4a family of receptors, which are different from conventional olfactory neurons due to having multiple types of receptors on a single neuron. I investigated these pathways through social transmission of food preferencce experiments in mice, as well as through innate preference experiments. I also tracked the movement of the mice in these experiments,and did supervised machine learning.

Straight off of my coop, I went on a two month study abroad around Europe, studying rhetoric and human rights.

Coming back to Boston, and back to science, I was still interested in movement. I had attended a talk given by Dagmar Sternad as a part of Northeastern’s Brain Awareness week, and I was fascinated by the questions of motor control. I joined the Action Lab at Northeastern, and worked on investigating the role of learning and primitive dynamics in a whip-to-target task.

Around the same time, I took a class called Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, about the connection between the immune system and neurological systems. The gut-brain axis, how people behave when they are sick and why they do it, the way that the brain can influence the immune system and vice versa; it was my first structured study into the immune system, and I was hooked. For my next coop, I started working in the Cancer Immunotherapy team at Vor Biopharma, investigating edited T cells to treat blood cancers. I was hooked, and have been working there ever since!

My ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8084-7249.

Outside of academics and work, I enjoy running, playing ultimate frisbee, reading, baking, and dancing.