Alexa joined Octant as an Apprentice in 2024. She is a part of the Platform Biology team, contributing to the dissection of sequence-function relationships observed in rare diseases to advance optimized and novel drug discovery.

Motivated by her little brother who lives with a rare genetic disorder of his own, Alexa received her Honors BS in Biology with emphasis in Genetics and Genomics and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before coming to Octant. During her undergraduate years, Alexa was involved in a slew of projects in the English Lab. She worked on quantifying transcriptional output of synthetic mammalian reporters as a part of an massively parallel reporter assay, investigating the precision in rare mutation profiling for the creation of a high-throughput sequencing pipeline, and expanding the tetracycline-inducible toolbox by saturation mutagenesis of the operator and analysis of resulting transcription factor function. She also enjoyed spending three years assistant teaching genetics labs and mentoring other biology students.

When not in the lab, Alexa loves to snowboard, powerlift, play tennis, and jam out to pop punk.