She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003, spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences at University of California, San Francisco, and joined the Hopkins faculty in 2006. Her lab develops algorithms and tools to interpret and model genomic data, with a focus on cancer. Dr. Karchin has a joint appointment in the Department of Oncology and a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. She is currently the William R. Brody Faculty Scholar at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering.