I started out studying mathematics, physics, and philosophy of mathematics. Part way through college, I left for San Francisco. On that journey through meeting different people, I got the idea to study medicine. I joined friends in Oregon and went to the University of Oregon still studying physics. While taking a biology course, I had Frank Stahl as a teacher, and I became interested in genetics.

After graduating, I left for Europe. I was a graduate student at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in West Berlin (Dahlem). Afterwards I studied medicine at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, thinking of being a physician in a developing country.

While doing an MPH in Tropical Public Health at Harvard School of Public Health, I re-discovered mathematics and computation through the mathematical modeling of malaria. I became interested in study design, causal inference, and statistical methods for dependent happenings. I earned a DSc in Population Sciences from Harvard School of Public Health.

My primary focus is in statistical methods for infectious disease studies as well as foundations of inference and causal inference.