Biology

This section covers my biology-related side projects, mainly interesting things I did in courses that I thought would be a waste to not put somewhere. In fact, sharing some of these reports/papers helped me get a job offer at the National Cancer Institute. Disclaimer: IF YOU ARE A CURRENT STUDENT, AND THE LABS ARE STILL THE SAME, IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO NOT PLAGIARIZE THESE. By Johns Hopkins University Policy, since I am only sharing my work and not any course materials, it is my intellectual property. Please exercise academic integrity. Also, you will get caught by plagiarism check.

Methods in Nucleic Acid Sequencing Lab (JHU, Spring 2023)

This was a pretty cool course on using next-generation sequencing technologies with the great Dr. Winston Timp. I worked with two other BMEs, Andres Parra and Anjan Singh. We did three different projects over the duration of the course, including characterizing the genomic content of soil samples; transfecting bacteria and investigating the reconstruction of the plasmid by sequencing; and comparing the capabilities of Nanopore and Illumina sequencing on identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms in human genomes. You can find all three reports here:

Cell and Tissue Engineering Lab (JHU, Spring 2023)

This was a pretty cool course for learning relevant techniques to cell and tissue engineering with the great Dr. Jessica Dunleavey. I worked with another BME, Eric Simon. We did three different projects over the duration of the course, including comparing different polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery; engineering cell-surface glycans by incorporating azide-functionalized sugars into the sialic acid pathway; and optimizing 3D cultures for tissue modeling of vasculogenesis. You can find all three reports here:

Microfabrication Lab (JHU, Fall 2022)

This was a pretty cool course for learning relevant techniques in silicon wafer microfabrication with the great Professors Andreou and Wang and the exceptional lab manager, Mr. Huy Vo. I worked with two other students, Maya Debouk and Wendell Choi. We manufactured a flow cytometer on a chip, which I detail in a report below. I also include a report estimating the energy consumption in the production of the chip.

Protein Engineering and Biochemistry Lab (JHU, Fall 2021)

This was a pretty cool course for learning relevant techniques in protein engineering with the great Dr. Aaron Robinson. I worked directly with Lucas Guerra and indirectly with Liwen Xia and Claudia Sesso to engineer a mutant staphylococcal nuclease and characterize its properties. Over the duration of the course, I produced several reports related to various portions of the process (from computational predictions to the results of acid, temperature, and salt denaturations). These reports are included below:

COVID-19 Modeling (Independent, Spring / Summer 2020)

This is actually more of a coding project, but we (me and the great @HuanlinDai on GitHub, UChicago Applied Math '24) developed some deterministic SEIR models for the spread of COVID-19. We were able to generate functional descriptions for distinct phases of the pandemic based on mobility data. We came up with some novel models of the transmission rate (for example, including masking data, adopting a decaying transmission rate to account for the impact of lockdown, and as mentioned before using mobility data). We also tried to predict the impact of Georgia's reopening on case count. We got it right at first but severely underestimated just how high it would go.

WiFi and Antibiotic Resistance (River Hill High School, 2016-17)

Conducted with Lucas Balda (Clemson '24) during my freshman year of high school. It follows up on an interesting study I read, regarding the impact of Wi-Fi and cell phone signals on bacterial antibiotic resistance, investigating additional experimental conditions.