I am interested in highly repetitive and polymorphic regions of the genome that are difficult to resolve using current genomics approaches, particularly transposable elements and other repeat-rich loci. These sequences represent a substantial and biologically important, yet comparatively understudied, component of genome regulation.
Within the Hughes Group, my work examines regulatory activity associated with these “unmappable” regions. I am particularly interested in integrating long-read genome sequencing with transcriptomic and epigenomic data, and in applying machine learning approaches to better capture regulatory signal in repeat-dense genomic contexts.
