Summary
Melanie is a bioinformatician with expertise in genomics, quantitative genetics, population genetics, and metagenomics. She has primarily worked on research in livestock species (sheep and cattle in particular), but has been involved in research on a wide range of species. Melanie developed the bioinformatics pipeline for the processing of metagenome sequence data from restriction-enzyme reduced representation sequencing (RE-RRS), a low-cost, high-throughput approach that has been used to generate metagenome profiles on thousands of sheep and cattle rumen samples, as well as other sample types. Melanie also has experience integrating different -omics technologies for phenotype prediction, in particular, genomics and metagenomics data. She received her Bachelor of Science, specializing in bioinformatics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, before obtaining her M.S. and Ph.D. in animal breeding and genetics with a minor in statistics at Iowa State University. She has carried out research in both academic and industry settings, with positions at Livestock Improvement Corporation (New Zealand), AgResearch (New Zealand), Universität Tübingen (Germany), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA). Melanie joined the Nevada Bioinformatics Center in July 2023 and is enjoying the wide range of projects she gets to work on.
Education
Ph.D., Animal Science – Quantitative Genetics, Iowa State University, 2016
M.S., Animal Science – Animal Breeding and Genetics, Iowa State University, 2014
B.S., Biological Sciences – Bioinformatics, University of Auckland, 2009