Vera Thornton

Program: Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

Current advisor: Laura J. Bierut, MD

Undergraduate university: University of Arizona

Research summary
I work under Dr. Laura Bierut studying the relationships between alcohol use, brain imaging, and genetics using the UK Biobank population cohort. The UK Biobank provides neuroimaging on an unprecedented scale with 40k participants scanned and more coming. I leverage my experience programming and working with big data to draw insights out of this massive data set. Over the past year I have been honored to present my work at CPDD and RSA.
In addition to my research, I work with Dr. Jay Piccirillo as a teaching assistant for evidence based medicine and clinical epidemiology. I am very passionate about research reproducibility and replication and I love sharing this passion with WashU med students through teaching.

Graduate publications