Flavia Negrete Arenas was a Senior Computational Associate in the Sabeti Lab working with the Viral Computational Genomics group. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bioinformatics M.S. In the Sabeti Lab, she has helped bridge the gap between metagenomics 16S amplicon local tools and cloud services, such as Terra. More broadly, she is interested in the software engineering and the interaction between the field of science that develops methods and software tools to better understand large and complex bio datasets.

Flavia graduated with a double degree from the University of Maryland in Biochemistry and Cell Physiology & Neurobiology. As an undergraduate, she worked with Ben Tall and Gopal Gopinath at U.S Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) to surveille for virulence factors within Cronobacter spp., a foodborne pathogen causing infant meningitis. This work led U.S FDA to extend an invitation Negrete for an M.S. Bioinformatics to Ms. Degree. During her graduate studies, she developed the first plasmid-search engine especially curated for Cronobacter spp.

Outside of the lab, you can find Flavia helping at Pre-Health Dreamers, a nonprofit that aims to educate and promote healthcare in immigrant communities.