General Information

I am an 18-year old graduating senior from the School of Biotechnology and Public Administration at Olympic High School in the CMS district in Charlotte NC. I plan to attend UNC Charlotte and major in Biology. Eventually I would like to work in the field of Biomedical Engineering. My scientific interests include anything dealing with microbiology and also tissue engineering, specifically the generation of tissues or organs using cells that have been reverted to a stem cell-like state. These pages primarily describe my research looking at structure in DNA sequences, carried out in the lab of Dr. Jennifer Weller at UNC Charlotte, started in 2012 after I took the Biotechnology, Biodiversity and Bioinformatics (B3) summer program at my school. Other scientific projects in which I have been involved include optimizing molecular marker assays to screen for chloroplast differences in American Chestnuts, to assist in programs carried out by the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF). I was the Teaching Assistant in 2013 for the B3 program (B3 link), and will be again in June 2014.

Research I Have Been Working On

Sequencing Known Oligo Nucleotide Constructs (2014 Senior Exit).

This research was done for my senior exit project in 2013-2014 and it involved looking at how structures in DNA can effect how accurate the results come out to be. This link will take you to the pages associated with this research:(Oligo Home)

Testing Primers Against Isolated DNA From American Chestnut Trees

I am doing this research in conjunction with the American Chestnut Foundation's Steve Barilovits, Dr. Weller, and a High School Junior named Kess Hendrix. Our research here is still being conducted so I can not provide a link to a separate page at the moment, but I will as soon as I can.

Scientific Publications

This is where I will post the links to any scientific paper to which I contributed. The Oligo research is in manuscript for submission, and I will post that when it is published.