Education

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA                                                                  2016-2022
  • PhD, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology                                                       (Defending July 2022)
• Harvey Mudd College (HMC), Claremont, CA                                                                                    2012-2016
  • B.S., Mathematical & Computational Biology (Joint Major)

 

Research Experience

• Ryder Lab (Research Assistant), WPI                                                                                              2016-Present
  • Agent-based modeling in NetLogo to research the impact of memory impairments on bumblebee-plant dynamics.
  • Deep-learning methods to improve classification and analysis of behavioral videos of bumblebees.
• Bush Lab (Research Intern), HMC                                                                                                 Summer 2015
  • Developed algorithms to identify horizontal gene transfer events in bacterial species and implemented them in Python. Utilized Github for project management.
• McFadden Lab (Research Intern), HMC                                                                                              2014-2015
  • Conducted a study of the hybridization of soft corals using Next-Generation Sequencing (RADseq).
• Drewell Lab (Research Intern), HMC                                                                                            Summer 2013
  • Designed and implemented a general non-linear parameter estimation algorithm.
  • Programmed in C++, utilized OpenMP and XSEDE Blacklight supercomputing resources
• Butte Lab (Research Intern), Stanford Center of Biomedical Informatics                              Summer 2012
  • Determined shared etiological factors of six autoimmune diseases using meta-analysis techniques on publicly available microarray data.

 

Publications

• Modeling scale up of anthropogenic impacts from individual pollinator behavior to pollination systems (2021)
  • R. J .Gegear*, K. Heath*, E. F. Ryder.  Conservation Biology
• Using COVID-19 as a teaching tool in a time of remote learning: A workflow for bioinformatic approaches to identifying candidates for therapeutic and vaccine development (2020)
  • S. Bryce, K. Heath, I. Luca, E. F. Ryder, R. P. Rao. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education 48:492–498.
• Experimental Test-Bed for Bumblebee-Inspired Channel Selection in an Ad-Hoc Network (2018)
  • K. S. Gill,…, K. Heath, R. J. Gegear, E. F. Ryder, and A. M. Wyglinski. 2018 IEEE 88th VTC Fall, 1-5
• On the Capacity Bounds for Bumblebee-Inspired Connected Vehicle Networks via Queuing Theory (2018)
  • K. S. Gill, K. Heath, R. J. Gegear, E. F. Ryder, and A. M. Wyglinski. 2018 IEEE 87th VTC Spring, 1–6
• Memory Matters: Bumblebee Behavioral Models for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications (2018)
  • K. S. Gill, B. Aygun, K. Heath, R. J. Gegear, E. F. Ryder, and A. M. Wyglinski. IEEE Access 6: 25437–47
• xenoGI: reconstructing the history of genomic island insertions in clades of closely related bacteria (2018)
  • EC. Bush,…, K. Heath. BMC Bioinformatics 19 (1): 32

*Co-first authors

 

Technical Skills

Programming and Analysis: R, Python, NetLogo, Java, C++, MATLAB, SQL

Software & Tools: Clustal Omega, UCSF Chimera, Unix, Linux

 

Awards and Honors

NSF NRT Circular Economy and Data Analytics Engineering Research (CEDAR) Fellows Award                 2021