Academic Outreach
symBIOsis
From 2020-2022, I was a member of the organizational board of symBIOsis, a graduate student group in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins founded by PhD students in 2020.
A few things symBIOsis offers to biology grad students:
- Practice rotation talks for first years
- Mock qualifying exams for second years
- Advising meetings on topics like choosing thesis labs and writing grant applications
- Mentorship pairing and events to connect first years with upper year students (“Biobuddies”)
- Resources for grad school (Baltimore housing guide, fellowship examples)
- Social events (trivia nights, movie screenings)
Check out our highlights for applying to the NSF GRFP. And if you’d like to see any of the other resources, send me an email!
Computationally Designing CRISPR Reagents
I was awarded a 2021 Institutional Enhancement Grant from the Johns Hopkins Center for Teaching Excellence & Innovation along with Dylan Taylor, another grad student in my lab. We used this support to develop a computational approach for designing CRISPR reagents, which was implemented as a five-week module in the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 sections of the Developmental Genetics Lab course for undergraduates.
We’ve updated these resources to offer a standalone module for anyone interested in learning and using Python; check out our GitHub. Together, the notebooks form the foundation of a program to generate CRISPR reagents for any target sequence and any tag modification.
Hidden Markov Models in Python
In 2020 and 2021, Dylan and I created and taught a two-part computational biology workshop series on hidden markov models for Agara Bio, a community bio lab led by Johns Hopkins undergraduates.
These notebooks offer a module to take users through introductory Python and HMM basics to developing a standalone model to parse any DNA sequence. Check out our GitHub, and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!