I am an assistant professor at Rutgers University studying the dynamics of evolutionary innovation in microbes. My work addresses how mobile genetic elements ("selfish genes") accelerate the evolution of novel traits like antibiotic resistance, and spread such traits through inter-species gene transfer networks.

Before coming to Rutgers, I spent two years as a computational biology postdoc at Harvard Medical School, two years conducting independent research and teaching at Old Dominion University, and four and a half years as a systems biology postdoc at the Center for Quantitative Biodesign at Duke University.

At the Duke Center for Quantitative Biodesign, I discovered that duplicated antibiotic resistance genes reveal ongoing natural selection and gene transfer networks in bacteria, using mathematical modeling, synthetic biology, evolution experiments, and "big data" genomics.

I have an B.Sc. in Computational Biology, with honors, from Brown University, and in 2016, I defended my PhD in experimental evolution at Michigan State with Rich Lenski.