Assistant professor at the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology and the Institute for Biosecurity and Microbial Forensics (IBMF) at Oklahoma State University. My background includes computational and molecular biology. My work focuses on developing bioinformatic and molecular tools to detect plant pathogen in high throughput data. I’m the the lead developer of Microbe Finder (MiFi), a graphical user interface that is used to create and validate e-probes for the detection of pathogens in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data. MiFi has been used to evaluate e-probes for Citrus, Poaceae, Roses, Blueberries, Pomes and a variety of regulated pathogens on multiple hosts. Additionally, my research has been instrumental to develop protocols that increase pathogen availability in HTS libraries, ultimately increasing HTS sensitivity in detection using Target Specific Reverse Primer Pools (TASPERT). I’m also actively working on computational modeling to predict crop productivity and pathogen detection. I have extensive experience analyzing, genomic, transcriptomic and metagenomic big data from long and short read HTS platforms. By using HTS we aim to develop the appropriate protocols to detect any pathogen in any plant sample. Currently I am using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) minION sequencer to validate portability of sequencing devices for diagnostics.