Melanie Bahlo
Melanie Bahlo is an Australian statistical geneticist and bioinformatician. Biography. Bahlo’s interest with science and biology developed at a very young age. Growing up in Germany, she used to record the birds that came and visited her bird feeder during winter. Bahlo attended secondary school at Albury High School in Albury, Australia. She received her PhD in population genetics from Monash University in 1998. Bahlo's research interests include statistics, genetics, bioinformatics, and population genetics. Her work has "led to the discovery of new genes involved in genetic diseases such as deafness and epilepsy". She is a  member of the team of scientists affiliated with the Lowy Medical Research Institute (LMRI) studying the genetic basis for macular telangiectasia type 2. She directed the most recent Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), which discovered common genetic variants associated with MacTel. As of 2009 she is the Laboratory head in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research, where her work has focused on "high throughput sequencing data of human and non-human organisms". Bahlo's research projects have included: Bahlo and colleagues (Dr. Mark Bennett and Dr. Haloom Rafehi) from the Walter and Eliza  Hall Institute of Medical Research and their international consortium have contributed to a decades-long global effort that revealed two new gene mutations that cause a rare type of epilepsy.