Hi, I’m Valeria!

• I have previously worked at Mammoth Biosciences on the CNS extrahepatic team, where I was responsible for developing protocols to differentiate patient-derived iPSCs into neural cells, and validate their successful differentiation into fully mature neural cells. I also contributed towards large scale gene editing screens, and assessed efficiency using tools such as ZAG-PCR. For both efforts, I accelerated data analysis efforts by automating data processing, statistical analysis, and graphing.

• Prior to Mammoth Biosciences, I graduated with my Master of Science in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in December 2023, where I studied double strand break repair pathways in relation to the cell cycle in mammalian cell culture in Professor Chris Richardson's lab. During this time, I also collaborated with other lab members to develop a rudimentary ChIP (Chromatin Immuno Precipitation) sequence data analysis pipeline. I wrote this pipeline using snakemake, and it is available here under the repository SnakeSeq.

• I completed my Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle in March 2020. During this time I worked as an Undergraduate Research Associate in Professor Daniel Promislow's lab studying the systems biology of age associated diseases - in my case mitochondrial diseases such as Leigh's syndrome associated with mutations in the mitochondrial gene ND2. To do so, I conducted Genome Wide Association studies of data collected from Drosophila with varying genetic backgrounds to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with ameliorating or exacerbating the effects of this mitochondrial mutation. As such, I had to prepare and process large datasets prior to conducting GWAS and statistical analyses to identify these SNPs. My workflow for analyzing this data is available here in the repository SpinFly.

• Collectively, these experiences have made me passionate to learn about and use systems and quantitative biology approaches to understand complex diseases, and in turn, guide bioengineering research for gene and cell therapies.

• 📫 How to reach me: My linkedin profile is linked to my github profile here