Dr. Irene Kaplow

Biography

Irene Kaplow is an Assistant Professor in the Biological Sciences and Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Departments at Carnegie Mellon University. Her lab investigates the role of transcriptional regulation in the evolution of vertebrate metabolic phenotypes and dissects the sequence differences in regulatory elements and orthologs that are caused by variations in regulatory activity between species. Irene obtained her B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. She began her career as a computational biologist under the mentorship of Bonnie Berger and pursued graduate studies at Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2017. During her time at Stanford, she worked in the labs of Hunter Fraser and Anshul Kundaje to develop methods for analyzing novel high-throughput sequencing datasets to better understand the roles of DNA methylation and Cys2-His2 zinc finger transcription factor binding in transcriptional regulation. Following her doctoral studies, she worked as a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow in Andreas Pfenning's lab within the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where she developed techniques to identify regulatory elements and explore how differences in regulatory activity contribute to the evolution of neurological phenotypes. Irene also served as a research scientist in Charles Gersbach's lab at the Center for Advanced Genomics Technologies at Duke University, where she contributed to experimental tests on the effects of manipulating a candidate myosin gene enhancer on myosin gene expression and cardiomyocyte development.

Research Interests