welcome!
My name is Laura and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Pardis Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I develop methods for the detection of viral sequences in RNA sequencing data to uncover novel viruses, map the human virome in health and disease, and investigate how viral infections influence host gene expression.
Having worked in both wet-lab and computer science roles, I have a passion for bridging the gap between molecular and computational biology, tackling challenges at the intersection of these fields. My first software project, gget, simplifies genomic database querying and complex bioinformatics workflows, such as gene enrichment analysis and protein structure prediction with AlphaFold2, into a single line of code. With over 150,000 downloads worldwide, gget has become a global standard in genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics data analysis and was awarded Germany’s Open Knowledge Foundation Prototype Fund Award for Innovative Open-Source Software.
I completed my Ph.D. in Biology with Prof. Lior Pachter at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after earning my bachelor's and master’s degrees in microbiology and biotechnology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. During my Ph.D., among others, I developed an algorithm for the detection of previously unknown viral sequences in RNA sequence data.
Outside of the lab, I enjoy any outdoor activity, especially those involving water. I am a certified lifeguard and, immediately after arriving in Boston, I got my sailing license at the MIT Sailing Club.