Biography

As an undergraduate, I studied physics at Harvard. Physics was incredibly valuable training that has continued to impact they way I do science. It provided me with a strong mathematical background, as well as an appreciation for scientific approaches that attempt to discover general principles, rather than just a cataloguing of details and observations.

Following college, I moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where I got a job in the Biophysics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory working with Mark Bitensky, Barry Willardson, and Tatsuro Yoshida. I worked on the interaction between Transducin and Phosducin – two of the proteins responsible for visual signal transduction and adaptation to different light levels. During the three years that I worked there, I took a number of classes in chemistry, biochemistry, neurobiology, and immunology through the Biomedical Sciences master's degree program at the University of New Mexico.

In 1996, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and started graduate school in the Biochemistry department. I worked for two years in the lab of Ron Raines, and left Wisconsin in 1998 with a master's degree. I worked primarily on the cytotoxic ribonuclease Onconase, which is preferentially cytotoxic to tumor cells, and therefore has potential as a chemotherapeutic agent. Using biophysical techniques including surface plasmon resonance and fluorescence polarization, I investigated the interaction of Onconase with glycolipids in an effort to understand the mechanism by which Onconase enters cells, and its tumor specificity. While at Wisconsin, I received a predoctoral fellowship through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I also had the opportunity to gain a broader familiarity with biology, which led me to discover my interest in evolution.

In 1998, I came back to Harvard as a graduate student in the Biophysics Program. I did a rotation in the laboratory of Matthew Meselson working on the bdelloid rotifer project. The bdelloid rotifers are an ancient asexual group of species. Studying bdelloids holds the possibility of allowing us to understand the selective forces that favor sexual reproduction. After that rotation, I found evolutionary theory, and my dissertation was jointly advised by two theoretical evolutionary biologists, John Wakeley and David Haig. My thesis involved population genetic modeling of geographically structured populations, and game-theoretic models of genomic imprinting. More detailed descriptions of my interests in these areas can be found on the Research page.

In 2002, I finished my PhD, and became a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. The best thing about this fellowship is the opportunity to sit around and talk with the other fellows, who come from all different fields. During this time, my office was located in the Bauer Center for Genomics Research. Support for travel and equipment came from the William H. Milton Fund. I continued my work in coalescent theory and genomic imprinting, and started new research projects in a number of new areas, including human demographic history, altruism, and cultural evolution.

In September, 2005 I started as a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Lectures that I have been invited to give over the past few years include:

Genomic Imprinting, Development and Disease, Medical Research Council, Harwell, Oxford, UK, April 11-13, 2005.
"Genetic conflict in the evolution of imprinting: beyond maternal versus paternal."

Santa Fe Institute Colloquium Series, Feb 24, 2005
"Constructing realistic models using information from different disciplines: case studies in genomic imprinting and human genetics"

UC Davis, Section for Ecology and Evolution, Jan 27, 2005
"Escaping the island (model): towards more realistic models of geographic structure."

Radcliffe Institute Symposium on Computational Biology, May 18-20, 2003.
Function, Pathways, Phylogenies, and Populations
Co-chair, “Inferring population history from molecular data” workshop.