welcome!
My name is Laura, and I am an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow and FutureHouse AI-for-Science Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I specialize in machine learning methods for infectious disease discovery and triage.
During my PhD at Caltech, I developed gget, a widely adopted open-source toolkit for genomic and proteomic analysis with over 300k downloads worldwide, and created algorithms to discover hidden viral sequences in RNA sequencing data (Nature Biotechnology, 2025). My primary interests lie in understanding the role of viruses in human health and disease, as well as building machine learning models to assist high-stakes clinical triage in West Africa.
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.