Willard Washington Ford

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Hello! I am a Senior at UCSD researching pangenomic algorithms and applications under Melissa Gymrek. I study both Bioinformatics and Probability & Statistics and am currently applying to computational biology PhD programs.

I develop tools and algorithms for large genomic and electronic health record datasets.

Research interests

I’m broadly interested in problems that affect human health, especially biases in current genomics and biotech research. I envision a world where everyone recieves equivalently excellent medical care.

I previously developed population-scale algorithms for structural variant calling in long-reads data at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under Kiran Garimella.

In 2023, I interned at the Allen Institute for Brain Science where I implemented genomic deep learning models to predict cell-type specificity of targeting sequences in the motor cortex.