Mentor: Tim Triche, Jr., Ph.D.

Research Focus: Genetic epidemiology of pediatric acute myeloid leukemia

Experience: Lauren studies hematopoietic malignancies, specifically genetic predisposition to pediatric acute myeloid leukemia. During her undergraduate education at Brigham Young University in Utah, she studied codon usage bias and evolutionary genomics in Dr. Perry Ridge’s laboratory for three years. For two summers, she worked with Dr. Ian Baldwin at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, where she developed a computational pipeline to identify genetic associations with root microbiome recruitment. Through her undergraduate research experiences, she developed a passion for bioinformatics research, which she now applies to hematopoietic disease.

Undergraduate Institution: Brigham Young University

Hometown: Caldwell, Idaho

Publications

*Completed during time as a VAI graduate student

*Huang YP, Harmon L, Gardner E, Ma X, Harsh J, Xue Z, Wen H, Ramos M, Davis SR, Triche TJ Jr. 2025. bamSliceR: cross-cohort variant and allelic bias analysis for rare variants and rare diseases. Bioinfor Adv 5(1):vbaf098.

*Miller JB, Brandon JA, Harmon L, Sabra HW, Lucido CC, Murcia JDG, Nations KA, Payne SH, Ebbert MTW, Kauwe JSK, et al. 2025. Ramp Sequence May Explain Synonymous Variant Association with Alzheimer’s Disease in the Paired Immunoglobulin-like Type 2 Receptor Alpha (PILRA). Biomedicines 13(3):739.

*Abla O, Ries RE, Triche TJ Jr, Gerbing RB, Hirsch B, Raimondi S, Cooper T, Farrar JE, Buteyn N, Harmon L, Wen H, Deshpande AJ, Kolb EA, Gamis AS, Aplenc R, Alonzo T, Meshinchi S. 2024. Structural variants involving MLLT10 fusion are associated with adverse outcomes in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia. Blood Adv 8(8):2005–2017.

*Bertrums EJM+, Smith JL+, Harmon L+, Ries RE, Wang YCJ, Alonzo TA, Menssen AJ, Chisholm KM, Leonti AR, Tarlock K, Ostronoff F, Pogosova Agadjanyan EL, Kaspers GJL, Hasle H, Dworzak M, Walter C, Muhlegger N, Morerio C, Pardo L, Hirsch B, Raimondi S, Cooper TM, Aplenc R, Gamis AS, Kolb EA, Farrar JE, Stirewalt D, Ma X, Shaw TI, Furlan SN, Brodersen LE, Loken MR, van den Heuvel Eibrink MM, Zwaan CM, Triche TJ, Goemans BF, Meshinchi S. 2023. Comprehensive molecular and clinical characterization of NUP98 fusions in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia. Haematologica 108(8):2115–2130.
+co-first authors

*Wilson SL, Shen SY, Harmon L, Burgener JM, Triche TJ Jr, Bratman SV, DeCarvalho DD, Hoffman MM. 2022. Sensitive and reproducible cell free methylome quantification with synthetic spike in controls. Cell Rep Methods 2(9):100176.

McKinnon L, Miller JB, Whiting MF, Kauwe JSK, Ridge PG. 2021. A comprehensive analysis of the phylogenetic signal in ramp sequences in 211 vertebrates. Sci Rep 11:622.

+Miller JB, McKinnon L+, Whiting MF+, Kauwe JSK, Ridge PG. 2020. Codon pairs are phylogenetically conserved: a comprehensive analysis of codon pairing conservation across the Tree of Life. PLoS One 15(5):e0232260.
+co-first authors

Miller JB, McKinnon L, Whiting MF, Ridge PG. 2020. Codon use and aversion is largely phylogenetically conserved across the Tree of Life. Mol Phylogenet Evol 144:106697.

Miller JB, McKinnon L, Whiting MF, Ridge PG. 2019. CAM: an alignment free method to recover phylogenies using codon aversion motifs. PeerJ 7:e6984.