outreach

I am passionate about creating and regularly participating in outreach and mentorship programs that encourage and inspire young scientists, particularly historically underrepresented minorities, to follow their scientific curiosities.

I have written multiple blog posts while working at Variant Bio on how population genetics can be leveraged for drug discovery:

• What is Genetic Ancestry, and What is it Not?
• Spotlight on Population Genetics: Our DNA Has Value
• An Inside Look at Variant Bio: The Standley Fellowship Experience

While at Duke, I was a scholar in the IMSD program, BioCoRE, a community that is focused on and committed to supporting diversity and inclusion in the biomedical sciences.

As a PhD student, I founded a new student group, MicroMoles: Learning STEMs from Curiosity, focused on writing short, illustrated children’s stories based on recent graduate student publications. The ultimate goal of MicroMoles is to expose children to recent science in a fun and engaging way. Introducing these advanced subjects at a younger age will increase science literacy as well as spark interest for future careers in a STEM field.

In the summer of 2018, I was a graduate assistant for the Summer Scholars Program in Genome Sciences and Medicine, a summer research opportunity for freshmen and sophomore underrepresented minority undergraduates. Through that program I mentored nine students while they worked on their research, abstracts, and posters. I also designed and led workshops on communicating with advisors and applying to graduate schools.

In 2018-2019, I participated in the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center’s IMPACTS Scholar program. With the help of a professional informal educator, I have developed short activities engaging the general public at expos, such as the Art of Cool, as well as longer activities relating to my specific research for classroom and field trip visits. The program also offered workshops on effective scientific communication at public engagement activities.

I have also volunteered at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences where I assisted visitors in self-exploration of the specimen collection on display and the museum’s makerspace.

Additionally, I was an active member of my graduate department’s outreach committee through which I have visited schools for science nights with interactive genetics-related activities and taught a short class on DNA for the Females Excelling More in Math and Science (FEMMES) capstone event on Duke’s campus.