I am a first year Bioinformatics Ph.D. student and Plant Systems Biology IGERT fellow at UCSD. When I'm not in school or doing research, I enjoy being outdoors usually playing ultimate frisbee or cycling.

Current Research

Coming Soon

Past Research

Modeling Hypocotyl Growth in Arabidopsis: I used a parameter estimation tool called SBML-PET (Systems Biology Markup Language Parameter Estimation Tool) along with MATLAB to create a mathematical model to represent previously collected hypocotyl growth data. By continuously tweaking the model and comparing the simulated growth data with the actual growth data, we tried to identify new components in the pathway.

Novel Virus Identification in Grape: With the help of BLAST and PCAP, I took some sequence data and tried to find a novel virus in some sick grape plants. To achieve this, I assembled the grape plant sequences with PCAP and then compared them to known virus sequences via BLAST. I looked for sequences that were not too similar to already characterized virus sequences but still somewhat similar to existing sequences, so I knew they were not plant sequences.

Publications

Schultz, M. D. (2008). Modeling Hypocotyl Elongation in Arabidopsis. Explorations. 49-66.< http://undergraduatestudies.ucdavis.edu/explorations/2008/modeling.pdf>

Education

2009-Present
Ph.D. Bioinformatics
University of California, San Diego

2005-2009
B.S. Genetics
University of California, Davis