Where Are They Now?: An Update on the Career Development of Recent AAAG Student Prize Winners
- Where Are They Now? An Update on the Career Development of Recent AAAG Student Prize Winners
Since winning the 2004 AAAG student prize in Tempe, AZ, my career has taken some interesting turns that have led me away from academia to a career with the US Federal government at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park in 2008. My dissertation project started as a collaboration between my MA advisor at Stanford (Joanna Mountain) and my Ph.D. advisor at UMD, College Park (Sarah Tishkoff) to look at genetic variation amongst linguistically diverse Tanzanian populations, and my presentation of this topic earned the AAAG student prize (Knight et al. 2003; Tishkoff et al. 2007). After returning from Tanzania in 2002, I decided to look at genetic variation in the N-acetyltransferase loci, three drug metabolizing enzyme loci implicated in the metabolism of the anti-tuberculosis drug isoniazid, in these populations and other African and global population (Mortensen et al. 2011). My desire to become more proficient in the analysis of large datasets led me away from the bench to a postdoctoral fellowship at the EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology working with Richard Judson. For my postdoctoral project, I was asked to characterize the genes and biological pathways targeted by the hundreds of in vitro high-throughput assays carried out by the EPA as part of the ToxCast Project (Judson et al. 2010, 2012). After having our first daughter in 2011, I returned to work in another area of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD). I am currently working as a Research Bioinformatician with the Research Cores Unit of the National Health and Environmental Effects Laboratory, and have happily moved back to the analysis of genomic and proteomic data, where I am working to establish best practices of analysis of next generation sequence data within the EPA’s ORD.
I received the AAAG student prize in 2004 for my presentation entitled “Mitochondrial DNA variation in Yakutia: The genetic structure of an expanding population.” This study explored the molecular signatures associated with demographic expansion by examining mtDNA variation in the Yakuts (Zlojutro et al. 2009b), a Native Siberian population believed to have originated from Central Asia during the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 12th century and rapidly expanding in recent centuries under Russian governance. This research formed the basis for my master’s thesis at the University of Kansas, which was honored with the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools & UMI Dissertation Publishing’s Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award in 2007. For my Ph.D. dissertation topic, my focus remained in population genetics and the reconstruction of human history via phylogeographic methods...
