Research Interests

My research is aimed at understanding transcriptional regulation by noncoding genomic elements, focusing on enhancers and small RNA and how they are affected by genetic variation. I am interested in understanding the role of these regulatory elements in neurodegenerative diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

My approach to these problems is to develop computational methods to integrate different types of large-scale sequencing data, including different flavors of RNA sequencing, ChIP sequencing, and DNA sequencing, and synthesize these different sources of information into a better biological understanding of the interaction between noncoding genomic elements and the process of transcription. I then apply these methods to prioritize and characterize genetic variants associated with neurodegenerative diseases.