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.

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