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. Yet it remains underserved, because these patients are so rarely represented in pharmaceutical trials. The clinic also highlighted how much we don’t know, and how many patients (who are so often women) live with chronic but undiagnosed diseases. I went on to lead the UCLA clinical site of the NIH-funded Undiagnosed Diseases Network, coordinating physicians, bioinformaticians, researchers, and patients across UCLA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Harvard coordinating center.
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. Research is where we get the opportunity to discover and thereby widen access to science to more individuals in need. My doctoral work focused on the interactive effects of genes and environment in eating, metabolic, and psychiatric disorders, and my work in eating disorder and chronic pain cohorts reflects my underlying passion for understudied disorders that affect women.
Most statisticians haven’t sat across from a patient, 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.