Published on Nov. 28, 2023

Updated on Dec. 19, 2023

Hi all, I’m Mary. I’m from Lonedell, a small rural town in eastern Missouri. I went into my undergraduate degree with a passion for biology and helping others. Towards the end of my degree I realized how important and abundant data is in modern biological research. So, I decided to go into a computationally heavy M.S. degree with no computational background, and it stuck! My master’s thesis was aimed at improving the classification of Alzheimers disease status from MRS derived data by using Bayesian networks to simulate new observations. I made connections in the Bioinformatics and Analytics Core throughout my master’s, and now work as a Data Scientist within the core while working towards a PhD. While I have interests throughout many bioinformatics disciplines, I am particularly intrigued by metagenomics and hope to pursure that passion more.