About Pierce
Education
- Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering (2021)
- University of California, Davis
- B.S., Bioengineering (2015)
- University of Maryland, College Park
Projects
This is a compact list of highlighted projects. See the CV page for a more comprehensive description.
Virus Sequencing & Evolution @ VRC/NIH
Under the mentorship of Dr. Eli Boritz at the Vaccine Research Center, I developed algorithms to improve accuracy and optimize throughput of long-read virus sequencing methods. I also devised bioinformatics pipelines to assess virus evolution and selection by leveraging the unique data acquired by our sequencing technology.
Computational RNA Genomics @ UC Davis
Under the guidance of Dr. Sharon Aviran at UC Davis, I researched RNA structure and computational methods for analyzing and predicting them. My dissertation focused on the scalable (i.e., genome- and transcriptome-wide) identification of stable local structures like stem-loops.
Dissertation title: "Accurate, Automated, and Scalable Identification of RNA Structure Motifs in Structurome Profiling Data."
See Radecki et al. NARGAB 2021 and Radecki et al. Genes 2018.
See patteRNA and fold-fastalike on GitHub.
Software Engineering @ BrainScope, Inc.
I wrote and tested parts of a custom Android-based application and developed an automated build server. The application communicated with proprietary hardware to assess signs of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in real-time EEG data.See BrainScope.com.
Magnetic Nanoparticle Simulations @ UMD
Under the guidance of Dr. Benjamin Shapiro at the University of Maryland, I developed a first-principles based physical simulation framework for magnetic nanoparticle research. Particles were modeled via a system of differential equations simulated with MATLAB.
See Control of MEMS lab at UMD.
Medical Virology @ NIAID/NIH
Under the guidance of Dr. Jeffrey Cohen (Chief, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases) and Dr. Wei Bu, I performed serological experiments to profile antigen targets in Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
See Medical Virology at NIAID/NIH, Bu et al. Clin Vaccine Immunol. 2016, and Cohen et al. Blood 2019.