Specialist, Informatics

I am a Specialist in Informatics in the Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) at UCSF and a data scientist within the ATOM Research Alliance. In my current role, I work with teams of experimentalists at the SMDC and with our collaborators to manage the HiTS database and web app (https://hits.ucsf.edu). I engage with each team to do data processing, organization, ingestion and analysis for their high content screens and follow up experiments. I use both standardized workflows to ensure reproducibility and custom analyses for more complex questions. My current role utilizes my expertise in cheminformatics and data science combined with my extensive wet lab experience to tailor our system for the needs of each project. Aside from ensuring FAIR standards for data at the SMDC, my passions lie in learning from all the data available to accelerate the drug discovery process and deliver safer, more efficacious therapies to patients faster than ever. This requires iterations of computational model building and data gathering through experiments, termed active learning. My experience in both fields and affiliation with ATOM and the SMDC enables these close collaborations where I serve as a liaison between both experimental and computational teams. Rounds of active learning necessitate close communication and navigation of the varying goals and mindsets of each team. I am able to provide insights from each group and help both work more efficiently toward our common goal. With the help of my experimentalist colleagues, I have successfully completed rounds of the active learning process to build predictive QSAR models for drug-induced liver injury (DILI), blood brain barrier penetration and DNA damage response inhibitors. I have extensive experience in molecular, cell and tumor biology spanning from my undergraduate to postdoctoral training. During my training, the field of biology ushered in a new era of big data and I jumped at the chance to expand my skills into this arena. I pursued two extra curricular internships around computational image analysis, machine learning and data science and participated in several hackathons to learn and grow this new skill set during my PhD. I then accepted a position as a Data Scientist at Frederick National Labs working with the ATOM consortium. At ATOM, I applied my skills as a data scientist to cheminformatics challenges in early drug discovery with the DILI project.