About Me

Present

In December of 2019, I joined the Knight Lab at University of California San Diego as a postdoctoral fellow researching the gut-brain axis. Details about the project coming soon!

Past

I completed my undergraduate and MSc degrees at Western University (formerly the University of Western Ontario) in Kinesiology under Earl Noble. Truth be told, I became interested in studying Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and the microbiome only when I myself was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis (UC) during the 1st year of my MSc. A blessing in disguise, I found the field to be incredibly fascinating and completely submerged myself in it immediately. Not being ready to fully abandon my training in Kinesiology, I searched for a PhD position with the hope to bridge the knowledge gap between exercise and IBD. Luckily I found an amazing supervisor, Deanna Gibson, who took a gamble with me and welcomed me into her lab at The University of British Columbia Okanagan. While there, I gradually got myself into remission by the very experimental fecal transplant methods (which I have blogged in detail elsewhere) and since then I have been able to have a very active academic career. My thesis project looked at the link between physical activity and gut health, with a focus on the intestinal microbiota and its implications in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). During this time I  became especially interested in community ecology, multivariate statistics, and bioinformatics as they pertain to high throughput sequencing technologies.

I completed my Ph.D in December of 2018 and spent most of 2019 working as a free-lance data-analyst specializing in microbiome data, bioinformatics, and community ecology, as well as taught workshops in short-read sequencing processing and analysis. I also worked as a research coordinator at UBC Okanagan, where I wrote a large multi-disciplinary group grant for the use of designer probiotics in treatment of IBD.

Hobbies

I’m a lover of all sports and outdoor adventuring. These days I’m particularly into squash, soccer, and practicing primitive-style shelter and tool building.