Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease, the cause of which is poorly understood due to the complex biological and environmental factors involved. I will use computational methods to study the role of the epigenome in AD. The epigenome is a non-coding part of the genome that includes chemical modifications to DNA and DNA packaging. I will compare epigenetic regions found to vary between AD and non-AD patients across different cell types to determine if they are specific to the brain, which would indicate a possible correlation to AD. I will also investigate the affect of the genome on the epigenome to better understand the mechanism of genotype to DNA methylation, which may alter gene expression and ultimately cause disease.

I have worked with Dr. Edward Browne at the Koch Institute, Dr. Gabriel Victora at the Whitehead Institue, and Dr. Masaaki Murakami at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University on handson immunology focused projects. During the summer of 2013, I worked at Athenahealth to develop a tool to easily clean and import client data to the Athenahealth database system, which will save many hours of developer time.