After completing my biostatistics degree, I was looking for a company with a strong background in biostatistics and clinical trial research but with the need for bioinformatics expertise. Emmes was the perfect fit for establishing my new career as a Biostatistician contributing to human health and at the same time building on my prior experience in supporting genomics and other -omics analyses.

Emmes values collaboration, serving as a trusted scientific partner for our clients. What makes Emmes special is its diversity, and the creative thinking and service orientation of its employees. Emmes uniquely combines academic and corporate virtues, integrating creativity and collaboration with efficiency and quality.

I spend most of my free time in the Shenandoah Valley exploring nature, enjoying outdoor activities, or renovating log cabins.

At school I was fascinated by Biology, its beauty and complexity, as well as mathematics which provided for fun problem solving. These subjects, and later programming during my undergraduate studies, were my favorites and I knew then that I wanted to learn more and combine these in a meaningful way to decode complex biology. As an undergraduate student, I had the first chance when I created my own small business to help a company advance their primer design software to improve antibody-antigen binding - I continued along those lines until today.

Contributing to a complex study, from experimental design to data collection, processing and analysis, and then seeing results for the first time is very exciting. It is like shining light on undiscovered archaeological sites and seeing key patterns emerge after years of preparation. Working hand in hand with our scientific collaborators as part of this process is truly rewarding.

Working for genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter as a Bioinformatics Engineer, I helped develop Big Data genomics software applications and processed and analyzed results from the NIH Human Microbiome Project. After I completed my biostatistics degree, I joined Emmes as a lead Biostatistician for multiple large-scale system biology clinical trials that interrogated the human immune response to vaccines at the gene, protein, and metabolite level. Since then, my team and I developed a cloud-based analytical platform that provides our clients with scalable, reproducible, and cost-effective analysis solutions.

MS Biostatistics, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA
BS-equivalent in Bioengineering, Weihenstephan University of Applied Sciences, Freising, Bavaria, Germany