Leah Childers

I'm a computational scientist and applied mathematician who loves building cool things. I recently defended my Mathematics PhD at Penn State, where I studied how antibiotic dosing drives both bacterial killing and resistance. The standard measure of antibiotic potency, the MIC, assumes a steady drug level that patients never actually have, so I built models of what real, repeated doses do. The headline result is the Minimum Inhibitory Dose (MID), a dynamic alternative to the MIC for real dosing schedules: a formula (via Floquet theory) for how much drug to give depending on the schedule, or vice versa. The MID has been checked against static and dynamic in vitro experiments as well as population-level surveillance data; for example, following trends in gonorrhea surveillance data it predicts the CDC's 2020 dose increase of ceftriaxone. I have first-author work published in the Journal of Biological Dynamics and more papers on the way. To get there, I built custom numerical tools in Python and Julia (stochastic PK/PD simulators, ODE solvers, a matrix-Floquet stability solver) fast enough to run tens of millions of simulations on a laptop. Some of it is on GitHub, and the rest will follow as the papers come out.

I also build software beyond my thesis: LearnFlow, a deployed full-stack learning-management platform (Next.js/Supabase), and NeurAllegro, a language model project for sheet music. For NeurAllegro I designed a tokenizer that captures faithful musical notation (benchmarked against 15 other formats), built a training corpus from 53,000 public-domain piano scores, and trained a 25.5M-parameter transformer from scratch on a single laptop GPU. On its first training run it writes complete, valid piano scores with multi-voice harmony, cadences, and full musical phrases. I love numerical programming, performance optimization, and machine learning, and I care a lot about communicating technical ideas clearly. Outside of tech, I'm a classically trained musician (I compose orchestral music and play flute and piccolo) and an outdoor enthusiast who loves hiking and climbing!