Ellie Taagen
Genomics | Data Science | PhD | Seattle
RESEARCH INTERESTS
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Genome Editing 🧬
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Data Science 👩💻
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Food Security 🌾
Global food security and sustainable food production are some of the most pressing issues of our time. The importance of enhancing the productivity and adaptability of crops motivates me to apply my functional genomics, data science, and project leadership skillset to uncovering the mechanisms driving desirable phenotypes via genome editing.
My doctoral dissertation research embodied these interests and motivations, focused on the biological constraints of meiotic recombination in a plant breeding context, and the potential to modify recombination to enhance genetic gain. I leveraged traditional population development strategies, along with cutting-edge tools in genomics and transcriptomics, bioinformatics and simulation methods to better understand the landscape of causal variation and prediction-based breeding decisions. This research was supported by the USDA NIFA WheatCAP.