Jeff is a PhD candidate in the Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Jeff's current research involves developing methods to characterize the somatic evolutionary trajectories of cancers, with the goal of guiding treatment plans and drug development. He develops and maintains the related software package cancereffectsizeR.
Prior to joining the Townsend Lab for his graduate work, Jeff received his BA in Human Biology from Stanford University and contributed to a variety of research projects involving next-generation sequencing methods at the University of California, San Francisco with the State and Willsey Labs and with the Schatz Lab at Yale. These projects ranged from the identification of risk alleles for neuropsychiatric disorders via exome/genome sequencing of affected families to an investigation of the evolution of the RAG recombinase, a key player in the adaptive immune system, from an ancestral transposon.