I am a graduate student in the Ecology and Evolutionary biology department at UCI. I work with various plant populations including Arabidopsis lyrata, Arabidopsis thaliana, maize, and rice. My research includes looking at the genomic component and role of helitron elements in the maize and rice genomes, using comparative genomics to investigate differences in genic and intergenic genome evolution, population genetics of A. lyrata and abiotic stress tolerance in populations of A. lyrata and A. thaliana. I am currently in my third year of a bioinformtics fellowship through the national library of medicine, NIH and the Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics at UCI.