Margaret Alexander’s interest in integrating computational methods and cancer research began in high school when she was invited to attend St. Jude’s Science Scholars of Tomorrow Symposium and toured the Computational Biology Department. As a nearly lifelong resident of Memphis, Alexander had always been aware of St. Jude’s inspirational mission, and the tour heightened her interest in pursuing a career in pediatric cancer research. Alexander earned her B.S. in computer science (honors) and applied mathematics at Vanderbilt University with minors in biological sciences and data science. She participated in directed research projects at Vanderbilt through the Biological Sciences and Computer Science Departments, focusing on machine and deep learning algorithms applied to biological data. She has worked under Vanderbilt’s Dr. Yuankai Huo, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, to assist in the development of a Spatial Pathomics Toolkit which extracts morphological and textural features from cells in a given tissue slide image. She also worked under Dr. Allison Walker, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biological Sciences, to develop machine learning tools for the identification of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in Streptomyces bacteria.
Over the course of two summer internships, Alexander also worked in the Geeleher Lab in St. Jude’s Computational Biology Department researching the in vivo relevance of a mesenchymal gene expression program in neuroblastoma cells and in the summer of 2023, participated in St. Jude’s Pediatric Oncology Education Program.
Alexander has enjoyed having the opportunity to explore the applications of machine learning and AI in genomics, transcriptomics, and pathology and is excited to pursue a PhD in Biomedical Sciences with the goal of developing skills as a computational biologist.
Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
Publications:
Chapple RH, Liu X, Natarajan S, Alexander MIM, Kim Y, Patel AG, LaFlamme CW, Pan M, Wright WC, Lee H, Zhang Y, Lu M, Koo SC, Long C, Harper J, Savage C, Johnson MD, Confer T, Akers WJ, Dyer MA, Sheppard H, Easton J, Geeleher P. An integrated single-cell RNA-seq map of human neuroblastoma tumors and preclinical models uncovers divergent mesenchymal-like gene expression programs. Genome Biology 25(1), 2024. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-024-03309-4