My career path began at Florida State University, where I earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. Building on that foundation in programming and computational analysis, I pursued a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida. I joined the lab of Dr. David Vaillancourt, where my research focused on neuroimaging and medical image analysis. It was during this time that I recognized the transformative potential of machine learning and began applying it to my research after taking graduate-level coursework in the field.
After graduation, I moved to Maryland for a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My official appointment was through the Clinical Center (CC), but I worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick (IRF-Frederick). I joined the Artificial Intelligence team under the leadership of Dr. Jeffrey (Jeff) Solomon. My research focused on developing machine learning techniques to automatically segment organs/tissues and predict disease from medical images. During this time, I built end-to-end machine learning pipelines for model training, validation, and deployment. These pipelines had an immense operational impact as they made our segmentation models accessible to others and deployed them in a scalable and reproducible manner.
After just under two years at the IRF-Frederick, I was offered a permanent position as a contractor. I became employed under Tunnell Government Services but continued to work at the IRF-Frederick, this time as a Data Scientist on the Imaging team. In my current position, I continue to develop machine learning techniques for medical image analysis, but my responsibilities have expanded to include ML pipeline management, image software engineering, and collaborations with other teams at IRF-Frederick. In particular, I work closely with the Pathology team to develop AI methods for histology images. While my career path hasn’t been a straight line, my longstanding interests in programming, machine learning, and engineering have guided me at every stage. I’m passionate about building high-impact AI tools that are not only scientifically rigorous but also practical, usable, and transformative for those who rely on them.