Samantha Klasfeld: The Plant Cell First Author

Samantha Klasfeld, first author of “Greenscreen: A simple method to remove artifactual signals and enrich for true peaks in genomic datasets including ChIP-seq data”

Current Position:   Postdoctoral Fellow Rare Disease Research Unit (RDRU), Pfizer

Education:
University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA; Doctor of Philosophy in Genomics and Computational Biology, 2015-2021

Cornell University, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Ithaca, NY
Bachelor of Science in Biology, Concentration in Computational Biology,
2010 -2014

Non-scientific Interests: Dragonboat paddling, running, and game nights

Brief bio:
In 2016 I joined the Wagner lab as the sole computational biologist with excitement to process and analyze novel datasets fresh off the sequencer. With a focus on understanding flower development and regulation, I collaborated with my colleagues to study Polycomb repression, pioneer transcription factors, and other epigenetic regulators. Through these experiences I developed a new method to remove artifactual signals from ChIP-seq data and other genomic data, and streamlined ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, and MNase-seq data analysis pipelines. As technologies evolve in genomics, so do the methods to gain novel biological insight from these investigations.  I plan to leverage my experiences with analyzing and optimizing plant epigenetic datasets to gain relevant information from different types of genomic datasets.