Laura is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sabeti lab, where she develops methods for the analysis of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data to enhance global surveillance of existing and novel pathogens. Her work directly impacts public health, contributing to the rapid detection and response to viral threats.
Laura has a passion for bridging the gap between biology and bioinformatics. Having worked in both wet lab and computer science roles, she is uniquely positioned to tackle challenges at the intersection of these fields. Her first software project, gget, offers user-friendly tools for transcriptomic and proteomic data analysis. With over 150,000 downloads, gget has become a global standard in the bioinformatics community, praised for its ease of use and ability to integrate complex data sets. Laura was awarded the Open Knowledge Foundation Prototype Fund Award for Innovative Open-Source Software for her contributions to making cutting-edge bioinformatics tools accessible to the broader scientific community.
Laura completed her Ph.D. in Computational Biology in Prof. Lior Pachter’s lab at the California Institute of Technology after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology and biotechnology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. During her Ph.D., she developed an algorithm for the detection of previously unknown viral sequences in NGS data.
Outside of the lab, Laura enjoys any outdoor activity, especially those involving water. She is a certified lifeguard and is currently pursuing her sailing license at the MIT Sailing Club. She settles for frozen water in the winter, enjoying ice-skating as a seasonal alternative.