About

I am an MSc student in Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Manitoba, working in the McKinnon Lab within the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences. My thesis asks whether the composition of the vaginal microbiome acts as a biological variable in HPV clearance among female sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya.

That question sits at the point where microbiology, epidemiology, and data analysis meet. Day to day it means end-to-end amplicon sequencing bioinformatics, longitudinal and cross-sectional modelling in R, and enough wet-lab work — DNA extraction, qPCR, molecular assays — to know how the data I analyse was actually generated. I work across several collaborative cohorts: a topical artesunate trial for CIN2/3 in women living with HIV, the multi-site MAGY study of adolescent girls and young women in East Africa, and a gut microbiome arm of an early-antiretroviral-therapy study.

Before Manitoba I read Animal Biology at the University of Guilan, graduating first in my programme, and spent two years in the Safari Lab on stem-cell approaches to gynecological cancers — work that produced my first two publications. Alongside research I have held eighteen teaching assistantships across biology and microbiology, and mentored undergraduates on research involvement and graduate school applications.