About Me

I recently joined the Topp Roots Lab at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center as Data Scientist II, where I will primarily focus on the image analysis and segmentation problems, using a combination of mathematical, computational and data science techniques to help researchers studying plant root systems.

Prior to joining the Topp Roots Lab, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Michigan State University in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering (CMSE). Advised by Dr. Dan Chitwood and Dr. Liz Munch, I explored applications of Topological Data Analysis (TDA), Machine Learning, and Image Analysis to various problems in plant biology.

I hold a PhD in Computing (Image Analysis) from University of Utah. My PhD advisor was Dr. Bei Wang-Phillips and I worked as a graduate research assistant at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute. In my doctoral research, I explored various ways of utilizing topological features of data in machine learning and statistical analysis. A large part of my work was devoted to applying these techniques to study structural and functional brain abnormalities in autism.

Before joining the doctoral program at University of Utah, I studied applied mathematics at the University of Manchester in UK, earning a M.Sc. degree with a focus on numerical analysis. My master's dissertation, a comparative analysis of various source trajectories in cone beam micro CT, was advised by Prof. Bill Lionheart, and funded by industrial collaborators.