Scholarship

Research, presentations, and public-facing scholarship

My work sits at the intersection of medical education, healthcare systems, and data science. I am especially interested in how institutional incentives shape the path into medicine and how large datasets can make those patterns visible.

Featured Project

Rising Matriculation Age: The Cost of Delay

This project examines how the path to becoming a physician is changing, with a focus on the growing expectation of gap years before medical school. By analyzing national medical school admissions and survey data, I study how delayed matriculation affects physician workforce timing and the return on public investment in medical training.

The central argument is that individual admissions choices can scale into system-level consequences. A one-year delay may feel small for an applicant, but across a national cohort it changes when physicians enter practice and how many physician-years are available to patients over time.

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Additional Research

April 13, 2024

Characterizing Promoters for Terpene Production in Sorghum

Research poster designed for my work in the Hamberger Lab on regulatory elements that target gene expression to the epidermis or cuticle of sorghum.

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Research Poster

April 13, 2024

Characterizing Promoters for Terpene Production in Sorghum

My Role

I designed the poster and contributed to the project as an undergraduate researcher under Angel McKay Whiteman, my mentor, in the Hamberger Lab. Bjorn Hamberger is the principal investigator.

Project Overview

This project focuses on characterizing regulatory elements, especially promoters, that target gene expression to the epidermis or thick hydrophobic cuticle of sorghum. These regulatory elements could eventually be used to target terpene biosynthetic gene expression to outer plant tissues, making terpene extraction and purification easier while preserving the rest of the sorghum biomass for biofuel production.

Terpenes are plant specialized metabolites with applications in perfumes, flavors, dyes, pharmaceuticals, and biofuels. Because some terpenes are expensive or difficult to synthesize chemically, plant-based production systems can be valuable. Sorghum is especially promising because it is a drought-tolerant bioenergy crop with a thick cuticle that may provide a useful storage and extraction environment for hydrophobic bioproducts.

The project uses transient expression as a faster alternative to stable genetic transformation, allowing regulatory elements to be tested in sorghum and related systems such as Nicotiana benthamiana. In addition to terpene production, promoter characterization can contribute to synthetic biology libraries for bioenergy applications.

Research Aims

Optimize transient expression via infiltration in sorghum.
Characterize regulatory elements for targeting gene expression to the sorghum epidermis or cuticle.
Target terpene biosynthetic gene expression to the epidermis or cuticle of sorghum for terpene production.

Funding Context

Research funded by the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), with an emphasis on inter-BRC sharing of synthetic biology parts and making biorefineries more economically viable.

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Work in Context

Medical Education Systems

I am interested in the policies and incentives that shape who enters medicine, when they enter, and what barriers accumulate along the way. The gap-year project began from a question many pre-med students and educators recognize anecdotally: the path to medical school feels longer and more competitive, but the system-level cost is rarely measured directly.

Clinical Data Work

Alongside medical education research, I am building experience with electronic medical record datasets and retrospective clinical analysis. These projects are helping me connect statistical methods, reproducible workflows, and patient-centered questions in a way I hope to continue during medical school.

Communication

I care about making research understandable beyond the people who already work in a field. Presentations, visualizations, and plain-language writing are part of the work, not an afterthought.

Future Directions

I plan to keep developing this work in two directions: deeper analysis of medical education pipelines and more clinical research using patient-level datasets. Longer term, I want my scholarship to be technically rigorous, useful to clinicians and educators, and clear enough for broader audiences to engage with.