Research

Instrument design, computational biology, and machine learning for biomedical problems.

Forst Laboratories LLC 2025 – Present

Nailfold capillaries at 10x magnification

Capillary Microscope

Designing a microscope to image white blood cells in nailfold capillaries. Continuation of PhD work with the Eleftheria Foundation and Dr. Stephen Quake.

Collaborators: Eleftheria Foundation, Dr. Stephen Quake

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Lung Mural Cells

Writing Python tools to study how pericytes and smooth muscle cells change in the developing and hyperoxic lung.

Collaborators: Stanford University, MD David Cornfield

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Uterine Atony

Using Python to find proteins and genes that differ between healthy and atonic uterine muscle. Combined proteomics and RNA-seq from 21 patients.

Collaborators: Stanford University, MD Jessica Ansari

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IVF Outcome Prediction

Built machine learning models to predict pregnancy success from preimplantation genetic testing data across ~8,600 embryo records.

Collaborators: Reproductive Medicine Institute

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PhD Research — Quake Lab, Stanford 2019 – 2025

Designed and built a microscope to videotape blood flowing through human nailfold capillaries. Invented an inflatable "finger-lock" to increase pressure on the finger and modulate blood flow velocities. Wrote an IRB to study blood flow in healthy and affected individuals, recruiting and testing 82 participants. Developed an ImageJ and Python repository (capillary-flow) to stabilize videos and extract blood flow rates.

Earlier Research

Nautilus Platereader — Chan Zuckerberg Biohub 2020

Collaborated with Hongquan Li and Ivan Ivanov to design and build a high-throughput open-source ELISA-array platereader for measuring seroprevalence of COVID antibodies in blood. Worked with Dr. Shalin Mehta.

MultiSero platereader: photos of the assembled microscope and a labeled CAD diagram showing motorized axes, camera, objective, and 96-well plate holder
The MultiSero/Nautilus platereader. (A, B) Assembled instrument. (C) Labeled CAD model.

MoS2 Thin Films — Temple University 2016 – 2019

Diamond Scholar in Dr. Maria Iavarone's lab. Grew monolayer and bilayer MoS2 films using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and characterized them with AFM and STM/STS to study their electronic properties.

Pulsed Laser Interferometer — Temple University 2018 – 2019

Self-study with Dr. Darius Torchinsky. Built a pulsed laser interferometer to make movies of sound waves rippling through a solid.

Granular Packing — FAU Erlangen 2018

Summer internship with Dr. Thorsten Pöschel. Analyzed X-ray tomographies of marbles in a cylinder to study density distributions using C++ and MATLAB.

Non-Joulian Magnetostriction — Temple University 2015 – 2017

Research assistant in Dr. Harsh Chopra's lab. Head operator and service technician of the Vibrating Sample Magnetometer (VSM). Designed Wheatstone bridge circuits to measure magnetostriction symmetry.