My research interests focus on the molecular basis of cellular or organismic responses to environmental perturbations and regulation of responses. My long-term goals are to understand how genomic structures and characteristics control regulation of gene expression, how gene expression is regulated in response to environmental alteration, and how regulation and mis-regulation of gene expression contribute to adaptation of environment and malfunction leading to potential diseases.

        One aspect of my postdoctoral research in Department of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis is to identify genomic features controlling transcriptional expression dynamics. Comparing various genomic divergence across strains and species in yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and related species, insertions and deletions (InDels) play important roles in regulating expression dynamics. Another field of interest is to understand genomic features altering fitness and effects on hybridization. We employed maximum likelihood to identify differential fitness effects with the curate genomic variants and phenotypic effects in Arabidopsis thaliana. Another aspect of my research interests is to develop methods and algorithms focusing on pattern searching and efficient homology filtration.

        Building on this experience, I have recently joined Dr. Paula Vertino’s lab in Wilmot Cancer Institute at the University of Rochester. The work I perform in Dr. Vertino’s lab focusses on epigenetic regulation and epigenetic control of RNA polymerase pausing in human cancers and metastatic progression.

Areas of expertise include Genomics, Population Genetics, Systems Biology and Evolution with skills in programming (C, Perl, Python), statistical analysis (R), and system analysis (Matlab, Copasi, SBML).