Laura Greenstreet

Large mammals often require more space than a single protected area and having connected protected areas is key for gene dispersal. It is important to understand which protected areas are isolated or at risk of isolation. I worked with Dr. Claire Kremen on the first global study of resistance-based connectivity, which takes into account the many possible paths across a landscape. Our results identified areas that are critical for connectivity but remain unprotected and we compared the overlap of these areas with existing conservation prioritization schemes.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing has allowed researchers to get snapshots of gene expression in individual cells. However, as the sequencing process is destructive and disassociates cells within a tissue, there is a need for methods to understand how development occurs in both space in time. I worked with Dr. Geoffrey Schiebinger on projects applying optimal transport to understand developmental trajectories and helped develop GPS-Seq, a manifold-learning approach to spatial transcriptomics that allows cellular positions to be reconstructed without the use of imaging.