Early History

Olivia started programming in high school out of a curiosity for how computers work. However it was the clever and "neat" design of various sequencing assays she learned about in high school that grabbed her interest more strongly.

Under the suggestion of Dr. Stephanie Taylor , she switched her major from Biochemistry to Interdisciplinary Computation and Biology (IC-Biology) major to merge her two interests. In 2015, Olivia graduated as the first IC-Biology student from Colby College.

After graduation she was hired by Dr. Mike Cherry at Stanford University to work as an Associate Biocuration Scientist for the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) . During her time at SGD, Olivia started to recognize the barriers and appreciate the demand of user-friendly access to both data and the tools for analyzing them. Under the direct management of Dr. Stacia Engel, Olivia was exposed to a broad range of yeast genetics topics and was able to zero in on the variety of genomics-based studies as areas she wished to dig deeper into.

So she applied to graduate programs and eventually landed in the labs of Dr. Frank Pugh and Dr. William Lai at Cornell University where she works on bioinformatic tool development and investigating transcription initiation mechanisms in yeast.