Research Interests:
I am primarily focused on determining the role of the erosion of the epigenome over the course of life in driving organismal aging. To accomplish this, I am measuring multiple aspects of one- and three-dimensional chromatin structure and transcription during normal aging and testing whether chronic perturbation of the epigenome recapitulates age-associated changes in the genome, transcriptome, and phenome. I also am interested in identifying and characterizing genes in the genome that have been largely ignored due to their small size, also called small ORFs (smORFs). This involves using both proteomic and genomic approaches to map, validate, and measure smORF-Encoding Peptides (SEPs) in order to understand their locations, abundances, and functions in mammals. My background is in molecular biology, genomics, and computational biology. I develop approaches and software for analyzing and integrating multiple types of genome data.