Melissa received her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics from the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology under the supervision of Yaniv Erlich and Mark Daly and earned her B.A. in computer science and mathematics at MIT. Her doctoral work focused on interrogating the role of repetitive genetic variation in human phenotypes such as gene expression. Her group at UCSD aims to understand complex genetic variants that underlie common human diseases such as schizophrenia and autism using computational methods for analyzing and visualizing repetitive variation from large-scale sequencing data.