Leila is a third year Ph.D. student in the Interdepartmental Genetics and Genomics (IGG) program. She is working on new ways to compute on gene function predictions to enable crop improvement, such as using phylogenetics for comparative functional genomics of crop species annotated by the GOMAP pipeline (GOMAP). She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Lebanese American University (LAU). She later joined Dr. Sima Tokajian's Microbial Genomics lab and got a Master's degree in Molecular Biology in 2018. Her main research at that time was about the genomic characterization of a Vibrio parahaemolyticus outbreak.