Pixie Genomics exists to make science useful, safe, and available to everyday people. Clinical translation is at the core of the work: a product that makes it to market, a research finding that gets published, stakeholders who understand the underlying science, and people empowered by access to health knowledge.
I began in clinical genetics at UCLA, where I quickly learned that rare disease occurs every day and, taken together, is not so rare at all. The clinic also highlighted how much we don’t know, and how many people live with chronic but unexplained diseases. I went on to lead the UCLA clinical site of the NIH-funded Undiagnosed Diseases Network, coordinating physicians, bioinformaticians, researchers, and patients across sites.
Those clinical experiences sparked a passion for research, and I completed a PhD in computational and statistical genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. My doctoral work focused on the interactive effects of genes and environment in eating, metabolic, and psychiatric disorders explored using machine learning models.
Most statisticians haven’t worked in patient-facing healthcare roles and most clinicians don’t build advanced statistical models. I’ve done both, across more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in rare disease, biobank-scale genomics, and machine learning. I believe the best analysis comes from understanding where the numbers come from and who they’ll affect. When you work with me, you get rigorous methods, honest interpretation, and results explained clearly to whoever needs them, whether that’s a statistician, a clinician, or a board.