Melissa Gymrek is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Departments of Medicine and Computer Science & Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in bioinformatics and integrative genomics from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology under the supervision of Yaniv Erlich and Mark Daly.

Gymrek’s major research interest is to understand complex genetic variants that underlie phenotypic changes, ultimately leading to human disease. Her recent work focuses on repetitive DNA variants known as short tandem repeats (STRs) as a model for complex variation. She develops computational methods for analyzing and visualizing complex variation from large-scale sequencing data. These tools allow us for the first time to answer many questions regarding STRs and other variant types, including their contribution to complex human phenotypes.