About Nathalie

Nathalie Bonin is finishing her first year as a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Maryland. She is fortunate to have Dr. Mihai Pop as her advisor, with whom she has the opportunity to work on two projects: the NCBI Pathogen Detection plasmid reconstruction project (in collaboration of Adena Collens, first-year PhD student at UMD's Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics program, and Dr. Seth Commichaux, Bioinformatics Researcher at the FDA and former Computational Biology PhD student at UMD), and the phylogenetic compression project (in the collaboration of NaKyung Lee, second-year PhD student at UMD's Computer Science program). Furthemore, during her time at UMD, she also had the occasion to work with Dr. Hannah Zierden and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering undergrad Karolina Akelaitis on their research in extracellular vesicles and the vaginal microbiome.

Before joining UMD, Nathalie went to the University of Florida for her undergrad where she earned a dual bachelor degree in Microbiology & Cell Science and in Computer Science, with a minor in Spanish. She had the pleasure to be an NSF REU student advised by Dr. Christina Boucher. The research projects she undertook during her time in the Boucher Lab included the recognition of antimicrobial-resistance-conferring structural variants (with the collaboration of other researchers in the Microbiol Ecology Group). Also during her time with Christina Boucher, Nathalie had the occasion to work with Dr. Ilya Slizovskiy and his advisor Dr. Noelle Noyes from the University of Minnesota on their investigations of target- enriched long-read sequencing of resistomes and mobilomes.

In addition to research, Nathalie is very involved as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Chair in the Computer Science Graduate Student Council (GradCo). She also takes an active role in the Graduate Labor Union (GLU) especially with regards to organizing her fellow grad workers.