As a Master of Science student in Dr. Lloyd Elliott's lab I am studying computational biology from a few directions. Below, I briefly describe these directions and present some entertaining materials from my studies.
Memberships
Master's Thesis
My primary research is in genomics and metabolomics with the objective of increasing the collective understanding of the process of aging in humans. Our lab explores statistical methods to learn about biological processes that influence longevity using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging and an exceptional cohort of Super-Seniors (conducted by my supervisor Dr. Angela Brooks-Wilson).
I am particularly interested in complex networks of metabolites, and how to learn about them to discover clinically relevant insights. Methods for learning about metabolomics networks include sparse or other specialized estimation methods for the covariance, correlation and partial correlation matrices. I am interested in these methods as they apply to graphical models.
Pushing research in this area requires a lot of reading. I have a queue of scientific articles: a mix of old foundational papers, newer statistical methods and applied studies. Reading Fisher's (1924) paper "The distribution of the partial correlation coefficient" was a fun exercise in rediscovering basic concepts in data, variance, covariance and correlation from a geometric persepctive. These ideas are foundational to graphical models. I have been inspired to adopt a geometrical interpretion of theoretical concepts wherever possible. As part of STAT 853 I read a paper that presented a robust and sparse correlation matrix estimator, Serra et al. (2018) and proposed an extension to improve their method's sensitivity without losing its superior specificity performance. I am working to evaluate the performance of my extension and apply it to our particular metabolomics dataset.
Phylogenetics
To complement my studies in human health, I am collaborating with Dr. Arne Mooers and Dr. Jonathan Davies to study the relationships between species abundance and how those relationships can help us estimate change in global biodiversity over time.
Statistical Collaboration
In addition to the research areas listed above, I am keen to collaborate on additional interdisciplinary topics. Most recently, I worked with my close friend Dr. Eric MacFadden to design, conduct and analyze data for his study on computer assisted implant surgery. This work was selected to be presented by Dr. MacFadden at the 2026 Ramfjord Symposium.