Research & Projects

Doctoral Research

Benchmarking and application of genomic language models (gLMs) for taxonomic and functional profiling in human multi-omics microbiome research (George Washington University, PhD in Health Data Science – Bioinformatics, expected 2028). My work explores how novel gLMs can improve omics characterization over traditional, search-based techniques.

Weill Cornell Medical College

2021 – Present · Collaboration with Dr. Nili Solomonov

  • Applying a Treatment Decision Rule–based framework for optimally assigning patients with late-life depression to psychotherapy vs. usual care — published in JAMA Psychiatry.
  • Analysis and visualization of depression trajectories in a large cohort of perinatal women — published in JAMA Network Open.

George Washington University

2013 – Present

  • Master of Science project: Association of maternal gestational diabetes mellitus with newborn gut metabolome.
  • Machine learning: Predictive modeling to identify biomarkers associated with asthma comorbidity using both clinical and airway microbiome data.
  • FDA-ARGOS: Data harmonization to prototype the FDA-ARGOS database of reference-grade microbial sequences, in collaboration with Dr. Keith Crandall.
  • COVID-19 meta-analysis: PRISMA and other projects — advising on R coding, data wrangling, and data visualization, collaborating with Dr. Fouzia Farooq, Dept. of Global Health.
  • Geospatial analysis: Collaborated with Dr. Hilary Silver, Dept. of Sociology, on geospatial data analysis of DC homeless shelter proposal feedback from local residents, using R.
  • Maternal health: Collaborated with Dr. Ethan Litman, GW School of Medicine, on data analysis of maternal deliveries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Mental health influencers: Collaborated with Dr. Bagmi Das, GW School of Education and Human Development, to build data collection for an Asian-American/Pacific Islander Mental Health Influencer Study.
  • Social media & misinformation: Cross-institutional collaboration led by Dr. David Broniatowski, GW School of Engineering, analyzing and visualizing social media content related to COVID-19.
  • Health topics on social media: Collaborated with two teams of medical students under the guidance of Dr. Marie Borum, providing data collection and analysis guidance on social media discussion of health topics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Extremism research: Collaborated with the GW Program on Extremism to collect and analyze social media from Twitter and Telegram in support of research publications and reports.
  • Text mining: Collaborated with Dr. Babak Bahador, GW School of Media and Public Affairs, to develop a text mining and data analysis pipeline for transcripts of political talk shows.
  • Consulting on numerous graduate-level and faculty research projects involving data analysis and visualization, across a wide variety of disciplines.

Software Projects

  • Social Feed Manager — open-source tool for building social media data collections for research (Python, Django, Docker).
  • GW ScholarSpace — GWU’s institutional open-access repository (Hyrax, Ruby on Rails).
  • The ISIS Files — Hyrax-based public repository of specialized artifacts, with the GW Program on Extremism.
  • Open Access Analytics — data pipeline and dashboard tracking GW Open Access Policy compliance.

See Experience for more on these projects.

Grants

  • 2025 — US Research Software Engineer (US-RSE) Association Community and Travel Funds grant ($1,500) to organize and teach a Metagenomics Data Carpentry workshop at Tel Aviv University in October 2025.
  • 2024 — US-RSE Association Community and Travel Funds grant ($2,500) to organize and teach the first-ever Data Carpentry workshop in Israel: a successful 3-day Genomics Data Carpentry workshop at the Weizmann Institute of Science in October 2024.
  • 2024 — Lesson proposal selected among 8 finalists for the UCLA-IMLS Lessons for Librarians in Open Science 2024 cohort, with a $5,000 stipend.
  • 2019–2021 — Co-Principal Investigator, Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving (CEDWARC), Institute of Museum and Library Services.