Sandeep joined the lab during his junior year as a Biomedical Engineering Major at Johns Hopkins University while focusing on Genomics and Systems Biology. Sandeep joined the lab with interests in pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics/computational genomics, and to help prepare him for this goal, he applied to the Harvard REU summer program, of which the NSF-Simons Institute is a participating institute. During the summer of 2020, Sandeep worked at Dr. Extavour’s lab to annotate the miRNAs in the cricket genome, and if possible, then to use that annotation to analyze RNA-seq libraries from cricket brains.