I teach in the computer science department at Tufts University. My background and training is in algorithms -- these days I am doing increasing amounts of research in Computational Biology. I've always wanted to try to make the world a better place, but until just recently I was the sort who just sent in my little contribution to habitat for humanity and various other worthy little causes each year, tried to make things better for people around me, but when it came to doing anything organized on a bigger scale, I guess I was paralyzed by not being able to figure out where to best apply my efforts.

Well, unfortunately, that all changed when after I gave birth to non-identical triplet girls, one of them passed away from a rare childhood cancer-like illness called Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (LCH) (The other two are doing great and keeping me busy). The only way I was able to deal with my grief at first was to try to make the world a better place-- first in raising funds for a particular approach for the development of a novel monoclonal antibody drug to treat the disease through the 503c charity The Children's Cancer Foundation. My family and friends raised over $50,000 in 2005 and almost $50,000 in 2006 to support this research through grants the Children's Cancer Foundation gave to Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the short story is that prelimenary results are very promising. The first manuscript is about to come out, and we are now trying to forge the serious partnerships that are needed to develop the mouse model and then, ultimately progress to human clinical trials.

Also, I am hoping to donate my time and expertise in my daughter's memory in order to run a scientific center at Tufts that will offer pro bono data analysis to anyone who is working on diseases that are too rare to qualify for federal funding (The disease my late daughter had is very rare-- even major medical centers like Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston only see 3-4 cases/year). For example, I already have most of my masters students start out by analyzing previously published microarray data sets for class projects as a pedagological tool-- if we shift to "new" unanalyzed microarray data that someone cares about, all that MIGHT happen is my grad students could gain a publication :-) My students and I have done some preliminary analysis of some microarray data related to my daughter's disease (a fitting first project, though we are hoping to help with all rare and orphan diseases that need our expertise), and have shipped the results back to the experimentalist-- we'll see what he thinks of them in the next few months.

I found omidyar.net by accident 2 months after the death of my daughter and the combination of support and distraction form the real world here, contributed to a large extent to helping me get through the grieving process. In the process, I have learned about so many interesting things and people and projects, and have had the joy of getting to interact with so many different people in a truly global network. Hopefully I have helped contribute ideas and support both to individual projects I learned about here, and I've helped support the healthy growth of the network.

I am a geek, a cockeyed optimist, a mathematician, a scientist, a mom, and sometimes an omidyar.net addict. Nice to meet you. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can use the "send a message to this user" button to the right of my name on this page; post a comment in one of my personal news threads below, or google my name for my outside world email address and send me regular email. Thanks!