Research Experience and Philosophy

As an undergraduate at Northeastern University, I participated in the University’s Co-Op program, which facilitates opportunities for students to gain career-specific work experience. Through this program, I worked at a biopharmaceutical company developing a mass spectrometry-based protein quantitation assay for pharmacokinetic applications.  After graduating, I worked at an immuno-oncology company profiling MHC class I and II peptidomes with mass spectrometry to train a machine learning-based neoantigen predictor. This predictor informed the design of a personal cancer vaccine that harnessed the patient’s immune system and neoantigen biology to fight cancer.

How did your grad research experience lead you to a Post doc?

I knew when applying to graduate school that I wanted to focus on research advancing mass spectrometry methods, instrumentation, and data processing pipelines. I’m highly motivated by the possibility of technological creativity enabling new ways to explore biological systems. I consider the research from the Coon Lab as an embodiment of that.

During my time in the Coon Lab, I worked on mass spectrometry methods to enhance lipidomic sampling depth and biomolecular characterization. Mass spectrometric analyses of lipids present unique challenges that impede both sampling efficiency and complete structural elucidation. Addressing these challenges can enable more granularity in describing biological phenomena through a lipidomic vantage point.