welcome!
My name is Laura and I am a FutureHouse Independent Postdoctoral Fellow and Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow working with Prof. Pardis Sabeti’s at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I develop computational (machine learning) methods to uncover novel viruses, map the human virome in health and disease, and investigate how viral infections influence host gene expression. I predominantly work with DNA/RNA sequencing as well as clinical patient data.
Having worked in both wet-lab and computer science roles, I have a passion for bridging the gap between molecular and computational biology, tackling challenges at the intersection of these fields. My first software project, gget, simplifies genomic database querying and complex bioinformatics workflows, such as gene enrichment analysis and protein structure prediction with AlphaFold2, into a single line of code. With over 150,000 downloads worldwide, gget has become a global standard in genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data analysis and was awarded Germany’s Open Knowledge Foundation Prototype Fund Award for Innovative Open-Source Software.
I completed my Ph.D. in Biology with Prof. Lior Pachter at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after earning my bachelor's and master’s degrees in microbiology and biotechnology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. During my Ph.D., among others, I developed an algorithm for the detection of previously unknown viral sequences in RNA sequence data.
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.