I assist the Flint-Garcia group part time with bioinformatics needs, mostly with GBS data and custom R and Perl scripts.

Why I Love My Job

I enjoy working with people and programming computers.  I enjoy teaching workshops on Linux, Perl, and R.

I have loved science and computers since a young age. I briefly attended an AP Chemistry in high school before I moved with my family to a smaller school that didn't offer it. But in that short time, my teacher got me excited about physiology which eventually led to biochemistry.

As an undergraduate, I found a putative alcohol dehydrogenase mutant studied while working for Dr. Terry Conley at Oklahoma City University.

I was first introduced to Linux when working for Ed Coe and Mary Schaeffer as a rotation student helping with maintaining MaizeDB (which later became MaizeGDB).

I spent eight years studying three dimensional protein structures, during which time I dabbled in Fortran, then C#, and then Java. Before I knew what a "regular expression" was, I parsed text files using Java.

Then I started working for Mike McMullen and Sherry Flint-Garcia and picked up Perl (and regular expressions, yeah) and Visual Basic 6.0 to help maintain their sequence pipeline and their SNP visualization capabilities. I really appreciate Mike McMullen's patience with me and his support as I learned new programming techniques and transitioned from more self-directed research to supporting his and Dr. Flint-Garcia's research.

In 2010, I was hired into the newly formed Informatics Research Core Facility at the University of Missouri, but continued working for Drs. McMullen and Flint-Garcia part time.

I am currently learning and teaching R because of its rich statistics and graphics capabilities.

I'm also excited about the upcoming release of Perl 6.0, projected to arrive by Christmas 2015. In addition to teaching R,  I hope to be teaching Perl 6 at workshops next year because it is even easier and more practical than Perl 5.

 

PhD Genetics, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005

BS Biochemistry and Biology, Oklahoma City University, 1999