Recognizing Plant Cell first authors: Christina B. Azodi

Christina B. Azodi, fist author of Transcriptome-based prediction of complex traits in maize

Current Position: Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Dr. Shin-Han Shiu at Michigan State University, MI, USA. Starting post-doctoral research associate position in November under Dr. Davis McCarthy at St. Vincent’s Medical Research Institute, Melbourne Australia.

Education: B.A. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Middlebury College, VT, USA

Non-scientific Interests:  beach volleyball, rock climbing, crafts

Brief bio: I am a computational biologist working at the interface of data science and bioinformatics to study complex biological systems. During my Ph.D. work I have worked on a number of complex biological systems including the regulation of transcriptional response to single and combined heat and drought stress in Arabidopsis thaliana, the genomic prediction of complex traits (e.g. flowering time and yield) in diverse crop plants, and the social and demographic basis for differences in opinions about emerging biotechnology products. My post-doctoral work will be on developing machine learning and deep learning based approaches to study single cell transcriptomics.