Hi, I’m Valeria

• I’m interested in genome engineering, cell therapies, and protein design and am excited about using powerful bioinformatics and computational tools to advance this research. I graduated with my Masters of Science in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in December 2023, where I studied double strand break repair pathways in relation to the cell cycle in mammalian cell culture in Dr. Chris Richardson's lab. During this time, I also collaborated with other lab members to develop a rudimentary ChIP (Chromatin Immuno Precipitation) sequence data analysis pipeline. I wrote this pipeline using snakemake, and it is available here under the repository SnakeSeq.

  Previously, I completed my Bachelors of Science degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle in March 2020. During this time I worked as an Undergraduate Research Associate in Dr. Daniel Promislow's lab studying the systems biology of age associated diseases - in my case mitochondrial diseases such as Leigh's syndrome associated with mutations in the mitochondrial gene ND2. To do so, I conducted Genome Wide Association studies of data collected from Drosophila with varying genetic backgrounds to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with ameliorating or exacerbating the effects of this mitochondrial mutation. As such, I had to prepare and process large datasets prior to conducting GWAS and statistical analyses to identify these SNPs. My workflow for analyzing this data is available here in the repository SpinFly.

• I’m currently curious to learn more about how to use ML to accelerate biological research in areas such as image recognition, gRNA and protein design, as well as how to write pipelines to automate basic biological data analyses

• 📫 How to reach me: My linkedin profile is linked to my github profile here