I'm a final year MD/PhD student at Harvard Medical School. In June, I will be starting as an internal medicine intern at MGH in the Stanbury physician-scientist pathway. I'm passionate about learning intricate principles of how our cells work using human biology observed at large scale. Previously, I completed an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering at Penn.
Research
I use genetics as a window into biological phenomena such as mitochondrial dysfunction, ALS, and fatty liver disease. See more about my training / fellowships and my publications.
For my PhD, I worked with Vamsi Mootha and Ben Neale. I used statistical genetics across hundreds of thousands of people to ask about how mitochondria vary across people and its implications for aging, resulting in several discoveries:
- Is there nuclear genetic control over common mitochondrial DNA mutations? (Yes!)
- How does variability in mtDNA influence disease risk? (Less than previously reported.)
- How does common disease heritability partition into organellar proteomes? (Notably more into the nucleus than the mitochondrion.)
I am fascinated by inter-individual differences and the mechanisms underlying them. Why do otherwise similar patients experience different courses of disease? What governs tissue-specificity for disease, and how can the same disease show different tissue manifestations across people? Answering these questions will yield new mechanisms governing human metabolism and biochemistry. To this end, human genetics combined with clever, tissue-specific molecular phenotyping shows huge promise.
Other Projects & More
When I'm not debating the various takes on the state of the world, I also love cycling and taking pictures, particularly from very high up. I currently live in Cambridge, MA with my fiancée Carla.
Watch this space for a blog which will be going live soon!