About Me
I'm Alex, a computational biologist at
Arrakis
Therapeutics working towards the development RNA-targeting small molecules.
I did my Ph.D. in in
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.