My current research interest lies at the intersection of psychiatric disease biology, computational methods used to study that biology, and the discovery of new pharmacological interventions.
Research
2020-2021 Internship: Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB)
Co-authored a review paper titled “Total Recall: Lateral habenula and psychedelics in the study of depression and comorbid brain disorders“. It can be accessed through this link: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/18/6525 Received training in handling zebrafish and various genetic manipulation techniques. (examples include extracting DNA from zebrafish, PCR, bacterial transformation, injection of a DNA vector to zebrafish embryos.) Optimized light/dark the acquisition in a behavioral assay for measuring scotophobia in larval zebrafish. Wrote python scripts to analyze the locomotion of larval zebrafish.
Research
2021 Summer: Harvard University
Worked in Dr. William Renthal’s lab with single-cell ATAC-seq data on a project about cell-specific epigenetic regulation in the Dorsal Root Ganglion. Link to the lab website: https://renthal.bwh.harvard.edu/ Integrated single-cell RNAseq and ATACseq datasets. Performed differential open-chromatin analysis and transcriptional motif enrichment using the Signac package. Created a shinyapp that visualizes open-chromatin areas from the dataset along with gene expression data for each cell type (Deployment on the web is still in progress).
Research
2021-2022 (Bachelor-Thesis): Yale-NUS College
Bachelor-thesis titled “Cosmetic neurology at scale: developing a high-throughput phenotypic screening for novel nootropics in D. melanogaster” supervised by Dr. Jan Gruber. Optimized drug delivery (CAFÉ feeding assay) and 3 different behavioral tests for automation purposes. Independently performed statistical analysis (power calculations, t-test, ANOVA) and visualizations of experimental data using R. Created hypoxia recovery assay to model recovery from anesthesia in fruit flies. Discovered that lacing fly food with caffeine, nicotine, modafinil, and l-theanine all improve the rate of recovery from CO2 anesthesia in relation to sucrose-fed flies.