Mentoring

I am deeply committed to mentoring and training the next generation of computational biochemists, with a focus on expanding access to data science in the life sciences.

• Undergraduate and High School Mentorship: Mentored 3 undergraduate and 2 high school students through NSF REU programs for underrepresented minorities and the NC Governor’s School. Several of these students have gone on to PhD and BA/MD programs.

• UNC Sciomics Initiative: Helped design and deliver interactive Jupyter notebook tutorials that introduced computational biology to over 2,000 students in Chemistry 430. This work secured $5,000 in external grants and led to a peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Chemical Education.

• Teaching Python Workshops: Taught introductory Python coding sessions through the “How To Learn To Code” program, where students learned programming basics and data analysis packages such as Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, and Scikit-learn.

A student I mentored as part of the UNC Winspire program. She is currently enrolled in a BA/MD program!

Leadership

My leadership experiences emphasize building professional development opportunities, promoting collaboration across labs, and supporting community wellness.

• Graduate Committee for Professional Development: Served as the Biological Chemistry Division representative, co-organizing the Industry InSight Conference attended by 130 graduate students, 14 companies, and 43 industry representatives. Raised over $27,000 from industry and university sponsors and hosted career panels with Amgen, Intel, Ideaya Bio, and AbbVie.

• Graduate Student Lead, NSF Molecular and Cell Sciences Synthesis Center: Leading the data integration effort across 8 labs in 3 countries to combine multi-omics single-cell sequencing and imaging data for network biology studies.

• Community Building: I lead monthly graduate student yoga sessions as a certified instructor, supporting wellness and balance within the Biological Chemistry program.

Industry InSight 2025, which I coplanned along with other members of UNC’s GCPD. We welcomed 130 graduate students, 43 industry representatives, and 14 companies for two days of meaningful conversations, career exploration, and community building. We also scheduled 110 interviews and 1:1 meetings just on Day 2.