Eva Beyer

Background

About Eva Beyer

My goal is to contribute to public health by utilizing my skills as a statistician. By leveraging my experience in bioinformatics and statistical methodology, I want to analyze the effectiveness of new drugs, determine the relation of risk factors to diseases, and evaluate the efficiency of health programs. I recently graduated from Western Washington University with a Bachelor of Science in statistics. While at WWU, I worked on an ongoing computer science research project in collaboration with the biology department to identify promoter sequences of MUTE orthologs between different plant species. Specifically, I analyzed the short conserved non-coding regions among orthologous promoters for potential transcription factor binding sites and searched for promoters genome-wide that have these same combination elements with the thought that they may be expressed similarly. I created an algorithm that identifies the longest subsequence matches in the ortholog, which enables the use of these alignments to examine the binding sites of the MUTE gene; these alignment patterns can later be applied to other, more complex target sequences. Working on this project taught me how to successfully balance a heavy class load, research, work, and volunteer leadership duties. During school, I worked as an office assistant at Joy of Pilates where I fostered a positive atmosphere for clients and employees by maintaining an organized studio, answering phone calls, filing paperwork, and updating the class schedule and client sign ups on MindBody; I offered my assistance for all projects the owner of the studio was involved in. I also developed strong relationships with other local business leaders and promoted the studio by attending Women’s Professional Networking (WPN) meetings in Bellingham as the representative for Joy of Pilates. Moving forward, I would love to gain experience in the public health industry and hope to contribute from a biostatistical perspective.