Postdoctoral Researcher · Rashid Lab · Montana State University
I study the evolutionary-developmental biology of skeletal fusion in birds and mammals — combining wet-bench molecular biology and immunology with computational approaches to understand how tissues like the sacrum and pygostyle fuse during development and how these processes work in mammalian systems.
My research sits at the intersection of developmental biology, comparative genomics, and metabolomics. Day to day, that means I'm writing R and Python pipelines as often as I'm at the bench. Current projects include:
- RNAseq & bioinformatics — differential expression, pathway analysis, and RNA-seq workflows for avian and mammalian skeletal tissues
- Metabolomics — NMR and LC-MS/MS pipelines covering everything from spectral processing to multivariate statistics (PCA, PLS-DA, Random Forest, mixed-effects models)
- Signaling pathway visualization — building a modular R tool for mapping transcriptomic data onto curated pathway configs (cGAS-STING, necroptosis, fatty acid metabolism, and more)
- HPC workflows — Slurm job management on MSU's Tempest cluster
- Imaging — microCT reconstruction and analysis; various types of microscopy
R · Python · Bash · Slurm · Streamlit · DESeq2 · Seurat · ggplot2 · tidyverse · conda
When I'm not writing code or pipelines, I'm probably skiing, snowboarding, building Magic: The Gathering decks, or in the backcountry.