I finished my undergrad studies at the Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, in August 2005. During this time, I worked under supervision of Professor Jon Muzio. Our work resulted in developing a new class of one-dimensional cellular automata which does not have the design complexity of two dimensional cellular automata but achieves higher fault coverage than the two most commonly used maximal length linear finite state machines: linear hybrid cellular automata and linear feedback shift registers.

Then I moved to Vancouver and started my Master's at the Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia. I completed my Master's thesis in Bioinformatics on RNA secondary structure prediction including pseudoknots, under supervision of Professor Anne Condon in August 2007. Our work resulted in developing a new approach for prediction of pseudoknotted structures, motivated by the hypothesis that RNA structures fold hierarchically, with pseudoknot free (non-overlapping) base pairs forming first, and pseudoknots forming later so as to minimize energy relative to the folded pseudoknot free structure. Our algorithm (HFold) uses two-phase energy minimization to predict hierarchically-formed secondary structures in O(n^3) time, matching the complexity of the best algorithms for pseudoknot free secondary structure prediction via energy minimization.

I am staying at the same lab and with the same supervisor for my Ph.D. I am mainly interested in developing algorithms for biological problems, and more specifically in RNA secondary structure prediction and its application. Something that has captured my interest recently is RNA interference and interacting RNAs.