welcome!

I'm Laura, a biologist and ML researcher developing methods for real-time infectious disease detection, pandemic prevention, biosecurity, and novel virus discovery.

I hold both the Eric and Wendy Schmidt and FutureHouse AI-for-Science Postdoctoral Fellowships. I work with Prof. Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where I co-lead the AI branch of the $100 million MacArthur Foundation-funded Sentinel Project.

My research focuses on understanding the role of viruses in human health and disease, and building machine learning models to assist high-stakes clinical triage in West Africa and the US (NeurIPS, 2025). During my PhD at Caltech, I developed gget, a widely adopted open-source toolkit for genomic and proteomic analysis with >0k downloads worldwide, and created algorithms to discover hidden viral sequences in RNA sequencing data (Nature Biotechnology, 2025).

Outside of the lab, I enjoy any outdoor activity, especially those involving water. I am a certified lifeguard and, immediately after arriving in Boston, I got my sailing license at the MIT Sailing Club.