Biography:

I am currently at the final stages of the University of Houston Biology Ph.D. program. My research, under the direction of Professor Dan Graur, focuses on evolutionary analysis of overlapping genes. My dissertation consists of three:

(1) the factors that influence the abundance of overlapping genes

(2) estimating selection strength in overlapping genes

(3) the identification of new, previously unannotated, overlapping genes.

My work has been published in several journals including Molecular Biology and Evolution, PLoS One, and Biology Direct. In addition, I was invited to present my research at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2008 and in 2009. On the long-term, I aim to use the rapidly accumulating genomic data to improve our understanding of evolutionary processes and particularly our knowledge about infectious diseases.

Abstract: