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PhD Candidate
George Mason University
Audrey Olson is a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at George Mason University. She also holds an MS in Nutrition from GMU (2019). Currently, she is involved in research that spans cholinergic signalling, sensory sensitivity, nutritional status, and gastrointestinal sensitivity in autistic people, in work at GMU, and at Johns Hopkins and the Kennedy Krieger Institute. She has published on both nutrition and autistic sensory processing pathways.
She is also training in the lab of Dr. Dmitri Klimov in molecular dynamics for drug design - a skillset that demands high throughput analysis of data collected from computer simulations of drug candidates and/or other molecules in their targeted binding site(s). As a result of this training, she has become proficient in a variety of programming languages, including Python, R, Fortran, Tcl, and shell scripting. Audrey hopes to fuse this growing skillset with her experiences in autism research to continue pursuing science which has the potential to improve quality of life for autistic people of all ages.