Coral resiliency across the Pacific
In collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Rohr Reef Resilience Program, we are investigating the diversity of adaptation and acclimation strategies that corals use to cope with environmental stress. We are sampling Pocillopora damicornis across eight locations in the Pacific, where we will ascertain how the region’s environmental heterogeneity is impacting coral genomics. We will then pair our field data with a standardized acute thermal stress assay, the Coral Bleaching Automated Stress System (CBASS), to explore the mechanistic underpinnings to thermal resilience.
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Photograph: Emre Turak and Lyndon DeVantier
CRISPR-Cas9 applications
As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I had the privilege to form part of Dr. Jamie Cate's lab for over two years. I gained a robust molecular biology toolkit that allowed me to be part of two separate research projects. I began working with Dr. Raissa Estrela Curado engineering the yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus for the industrial production of renewable chemicals, resulting in my first publication in mBio. After obtaining my bachelor's degree, I worked with PhD candidate Snigdha Poddar on engineering rice and wheat for broad-spectrum disease resistance.
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Bird health in California's Central Coast
For my honors thesis at UC Berkeley, I studied how land use changes in California's Central Coast impacted bird health via white blood cell metrics. This work was in done under the mentorship of Dr. Claire Kremen (UC Berkeley), and the Karp Lab at UC Davis. I presented my results at the Bay Area Conservation Biology Symposium (2019), and published my work in the Berkeley Scientific Journal.
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