STEER Fellows
2025 Fellows
Kayla Raygoza
Kayla received her undergraduate degree in Microbiology from California State University, Long Beach in 2022. She then worked at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project before joining the Whiteson Lab as a Junior Specialist in August 2023. Now a PhD student in the Whiteson Lab, her research focuses on clinical phage therapy, phage–antibiotic synergy, and bacterial–phage coevolution. Outside the lab, Kayla teaches acroyoga at a local climbing gym and enjoys going on adventures with her blind dog.
Spencer Hilligoss
Spencer is a PhD student in Statistics at UC Irvine working with Dr. Annie Qu and Dr. Tianchen Qian. His research focuses on statistical and machine learning methods for biomedical data, including causal inference, longitudinal modeling, and representation learning. He is broadly interested in leveraging data-driven approaches to better understand and improve health outcomes.
Sara Tyo
Sara is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at UC Irvine, advised by Prof. Zhaoxia Yu. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods for multiple testing and multiset canonical correlation analysis, with applications to calcium imaging data. She completed her undergraduate studies in Statistics at UCLA where she primarily focused on time series analysis.
Julie Loritsch
Julie is a PhD student in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior co-mentored by Dr. Craig Stark and Dr. Tianchen Qian. Her research focuses on the early detection of Alzheimer's disease by integrating neuroimaging and pathological data using machine learning and statistical approaches.