PRISM Scholar Research Specialist
B.S., Biology, and Health and Society Minor, UNC Chapel Hill
I am a graduate research specialist in the Purvis Lab and a PRISM scholar. I specialize in Iterative Indirect Immunofluorescent Imaging (check out my interactive walkthrough of 4i) and computational analysis to generate single-cell protein profiles that uncover heterogeneity in disease states. My current research asks how subpopulations within dedifferentiated liposarcoma adapt and develop resistance to therapy. My undergraduate research investigated how sex differences influence cellular senescence in osteoarthritis using primary human chondrocytes. I’m especially interested in how cells make decisions within their microenvironments and the factors that shape physiological outcomes in rare and aggressive cancers.
Understanding how cells make decisions and what influences those outcomes motivates me to pursue the unknowns, particularly in under-researched areas such as endometriosis and other women’s health conditions. I care deeply about bioethics and about cultivating spaces and community to confront inequities in the healthcare system. I want research and clinical care to inform each other, with science that is transparent, high-quality, and patient-centered, so translation to patients is truly useful.
In the lab, I use computational analysis to build protein profiles of fractionally resistant liposarcoma cells to understand how tumors and their subpopulations adapt to therapeutics. I work across an OR-to-lab pipeline and use 4i techniques on primary tumor tissue and patient-derived models to increase the translational relevance of our experiments.
Long-term, I aim to bring these single-cell analysis techniques to endometriosis, using direct patient-derived cell models to study a uniquely under-researched cell-decision landscape that does not neatly align with existing paradigms of ‘normal’ or ‘cancer’ biology.
