I have always been passionate about improving human health. Looking back, I think the seed was planted in me at a young age, watching my mom go to the hospital and tell me about her day. My mom has always been my role model, a dedicated and successful medical doctor. I loved hearing her stories about patients and how she diagnosed and treated them. Medicine sounded like this big problem-solving mission to me with the goal to get people back healthy, and what is better than good health? My dad was a civil engineer, and he inspired me to have a problem-solving mindset for everything in life, always break down the big problem into smaller pieces, and tackle them one at a time. From a young age, he would share with me details of his engineering projects and help me with my legos to build complex structures.

At MIT, I was able to combine my two interests: human health and tackling big problems! During my undergraduate years, I worked on implantable medical devices and in graduate school, I worked on non-particles for HIV vaccine delivery. The first human genome sequence was completed when I was at MIT, and I exactly remember sitting in my dorm room, reading the nature magazine with the cover of “the human genome” and being fascinated by the work and what the future holds. It was such an empowering feeling to know that now we have the software code to the human, which could play a significant role as we continue the journey to understand, prevent and treat different diseases. Joining Illumina to leverage the power of the genome to improve human health, was a natural fit and a dream job for me. Throughout my 10 years at Illumina, I have led several different impactful initiatives, including leading the launch of the HiSeq X Ten – the world’s first sequencer to break the sound barrier of human genomics and bring down the cost of human whole genome sequencing to $1000 -- compare this to 2003 when it cost ~2.7 billion dollars to complete! That represents a 2,700X reduction in cost! My goal is to continue to make a tangible impact in the field of genomics and make genomics accessible and affordable to everyone, so in any medical decision, we are leveraging genomics for a better and more precise diagnosis, treatment and even prevention.