Rhalena Thomas completed her BSc in molecular biology and genetics at the University of Guelph. Training for her PhD in neuroscience at McGill University, Dr. Thomas studied brain development and how genetic mutations can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders, including epilepsy and schizophrenia. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship in physiology at McGill university, where she studied sensory processing and neural coding in weakly electric fish using a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological experiments, Dr. Thomas joined the lab of Dr. Edward Fon at the Neuro, where she began studying Parkinson’s disease. She is applying computational analysis techniques to biological questions, using her data analysis expertise and cell biology knowledge to analyze patient-based disease models. Dr. Thomas works collaboratively to develop open-source analysis programs, creating robust automated pipelines for microscopy image analysis, single cell RNA sequencing and flow cytometry, using machine learning and deep networks to reveal biologically relevant patterns.