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 classification 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