About me

Hello! I’m Alex, a Scientist 2 in Computational Biology at Arrakis Therapeutics. I am a highly collaborative computational biologist with 13 years of experience in genomics and transcriptomics, large-scale data integration, RNA biology, and human genetics. I have 5+ years of industrial target nomination and drug development experience in disease areas including neuroscience, repeat expansions, immunology, and oncology working towards the development of RNA-targeting small molecules at Arrakis. I am experienced in people management, cross-functional collaboration, and communication with a wide range of audiences, and I am passionate about developing and applying computational methods to derive actionable biological insights from complex datasets.

I received my Ph.D. from the Genomics and Computational Biology program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Li-San Wang’s lab, part of the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. My graduate research was focused on understanding how noncoding genetic variants regulate gene expression and modulate disease risk. To do this, I developed algorithms to annotate genetic variants with regulatory activity, unbiasedly identifying the regulatory mechanisms affected by noncoding genetic variants, the target genes and relevant tissue contexts of those regulatory mechanisms and the downstream biological processes modulating disease risk. These bioinformatics methods are trait-agnostic, but my research mainly focused on neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric traits.