Student Profiles

Following his graduation from the University of Pittsburgh, David joined Supernus Pharmaceuticals as a preclinical researcher working to populate a biomedical ontology designed to support drug discovery, repurposing, and comparison in the neuropsychiatric disease space. Subsequently, David joined the Human Statistical Genetics Unit at the National Institute on Aging as a post-baccalaureate fellow under Dr. Jun Ding and Dr. Luigi Ferrucci. Here, he investigated the relationship between mitochondrial genomics and dementia-related phenotypes, including dementia risk, cognitive function, and brain iron deposition, as well as proteomic contributors to dementia pathogenesis. After his post-baccalaureate fellowship, he joined the Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias as a Master’s Fellow. While completing his Master’s, he developed bioinformatic tools tailored for the mitochondrial genome, including both traditional statistical methods and machine learning models. He also applied these tools to investigate age-related phenotypes in large population-level datasets. In his doctoral research, David plans to leverage the National Library of Medicine’s Cell Knowledge Network in tandem with multi-omic computational integration to formulate and investigate experimentally tractable hypotheses about human disease. He will then investigate these hypotheses in translational models, bridging computational discovery and experimental validation.