I harness the powers of math for the forces of good. Here are some of the projects I have worked on.
HYPHAEDelity Project
Brewer’s yeast, or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, can undergo a fundamental morphologic change from individual ellipsoidal cells to chains of elongated cells, called filamentous growth or hyphae, when deprived of key elements. I created the software HYPHAEdelity as a tool to help brewers and other yeast scientists rapidly assess high quantities of two-dimensional yeast colony images. HYPHAEdelity utilizes Python’s OpenCV image analysis library to quantify the magnitude of filamentous growth in individual yeast colonies. It is freely available on github, and is used in the papers listed below.
Disparity in pseudohyphal morphogenic switching response to the quorum sensing molecule 2-phenylethanol in commercial brewing strains of Saccharomyces cerevisciae, FEMS Microbes, January 2023.
HYPHAEdelity: A quantitative image analysis tool for assessing peripheral whole colony filamentation, FEMS Yeast Research, November 2022.
Financial Literacy Project
Financial literacy is a vital skill that is not regularly incorporated into the American public education system. I worked with the faculty of PS 41, the Greenwich Village School, to create a Financial Literacy curriculum for the fifth grade classrooms that would tie into the already existing math, science, and humanities programs. The Financial Literacy program introduced fifth graders to the ideas behind budgeting, taxes, banking, credit, debit, and setting attainable financial goals. The program culminated in an applied project that required the students to work together to develop business plans for small businesses of their own creation.
Please feel free to contact me for samples of the Financial Literacy Project. I am available for consulting about similar projects!
Human Sleep Cycle Project
Sleep is an endlessly fascinating topic. I spent a large portion of my academic career becoming an expert on the mathematical and neurological intricacies of the chemical and electrical chorus that governs the sleep-wake switching mechanism in the mammalian brain. A summary of this work can be found in my doctoral thesis linked below.
A Mathematical Model of the Human Sleep Wake System, Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016.