Rebecca is an associate investigator and works as part of the Open Science Discovery Engine team, which aims to map disease-associated cellular phenotypes at high resolution. Her work integrates anatomical approaches with single cell and spatial multiomics to map disease trajectories and characterize vulnerable cell types and affected cellular states.

Rebecca joined the Allen Institute in 2014 and developed techniques and scalable experimental pipelines for applying single-nucleus RNA sequencing and related genomic assays to human brain donor specimens. She led a team that contributed to large-scale data generation efforts spanning human and non-human primate brain atlases as part of major consortium projects, including the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network and the Seattle Alzheimer’s disease brain cell atlas, generating publicly available resources for defining brain cell types across species and understanding cellular vulnerabilities in disease.

Rebecca completed postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, where she studied transcriptional regulation of neurogenesis and cell-fate specification in the developing and adult brain. She earned her PhD in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine from the University of British Columbia and her BSc in Biological Sciences from Simon Fraser University.