Irene Kaplow

I received my B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. There, I began my career as a computational biologist while doing research with Bonnie Berger. I next went to graduate school at Stanford University, where I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2017. At Stanford, I worked in Hunter Fraser and Anshul Kundaje's labs to develop methods to analyze novel high-throughput sequencing datasets to better understand the roles of DNA methylation and Cys2-His2 zinc finger transcription factor binding in transcriptional regulation. I then worked as a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow in Andreas Pfenning's lab in the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where I developed methods to identify regulatory elements whose regulatory activity differences between species are associated with the evolution of neurological phenotypes. After that, I worked as a research scientist in Charles Gersbach's lab in the Center for Advanced Genomics Technologies at Duke University, where I helped experimentally test the effects of manipulating a candidate myosin gene enhancer on myosin gene expression and cardiomyocyte development.  I started my lab in Carnegie Mellon University's Departments of Biological Sciences and Computational Biology in August 2024.