Skydiving near the Duke Marine Lab, November 2024

About Me

I've loved animals and computers since I was young but never really knew what to do with those interests until coming to college and being fascinated by scientific research. Hopefully this website is some indication I'm on the way to realizing my childhood dreams.

Research Interests

I study how the evolutionary history of marine invertebrates shapes their adaptation to environments past and present. As an undergraduate much of my experience was in population genetics and AI research for ecology and conservation. Looking forward, my dissertation will try to marry some of these ideas together through the lens of evolutionary genomics, machine learning and computational biology, and the like.

In general, I seek to understand genomic signatures of adaptation to changing environments as well as the factors which generated the immense biodiversity seen across the tree of life. I'm interested in elucidating the genetic basis of evolutionary mechanisms such as speciation and selection, both across ecological and evolutionary timescales.

Brian Burgos, Unsplash

I am passionate about the application of new software tools in biology, and finding ways to incorporate and evaluate these tools alongside traditional approaches to extract new findings from biological data. However, my research incorporates field, lab, and computational dimensions. Please feel free to reach out at hs325@duke.edu.

Hobbies

Games: Basketball, soccer football*, baseball, table tennis, competitive Scrabble, typing?

Favorite Music: experimental and underground hip-hop, glitch pop, hyperpop, indie rock, singer-songwriter, shoegaze, dream pop. See Personal for more.

Miscellaneous: Chinese cooking, metaphysics, the color purple, being outdoors with animals of all kinds, Internet culture, stargazing, Pokemon, and web development now I guess...