Liz Hunter

I finished my master's in molecular biology at the University of Rhode Island in 2020 and joined the FDA Human Foods Program as an ORISE fellow the same year. I converted to a full time Biologist position at FDA the following year, and have been working to develop new methods to promote food safety ever since.

During my master's, I worked on a marine host-parasite-endosymbiont system and examined the life strategies of Apicomplexan parasites through a genomic lense. I started off with wet lab work performing DNA/RNA isolation, PCR, Illumina NGS sequencing, Sanger Sequencing, and microscopy, before transitioning to bioinformatics. Due to the nested nature of my study system, I utilized many metagenomic tools to separate, assemble, and annotate the genomes of the different organisms.

At FDA, I apply these tools to different mixed botanical products such as dietary supplements, teas, and spices, to develop methods for food safety applications. In my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in the Patro Lab, I'm interested in quantifying the uncertainty inherent in metagenomic classification and addressing this by creating new and improved confidence metrics to strengthen the reliability of predictions from different classifiers.