Melissa Wilson
Melissa Wilson is a computational biologist whose main research interests include sex-biased biology and how this affects human health and disease. Her lab primarily focuses on three main areas:
1) Atypical sex chromosome copy numbers occur with surprising frequency in humans (Turner Syndrome, individuals with a single X, occurs in 1/2500 live female births, and Klinefelter syndrome, XXY, occurs in 1/1000 males). The clinical consequences of sex chromosome copy variation is dramatically influenced by the evolutionary history of the human sex chromosomes. The Wilson lab is focusing on understanding the evolution of gene content.
2) Sex as a Biological Variable. The Wilson lab studies how to more accurately quantify variation on the sex chromosomes and how to conduct sex-stratified analyses.
3) Patterns of variation on the sex chromosomes hold signatures of our evolutionary history as human beings, including sex-biased bottlenecks and selection that may leave some populations more vulnerable to specific diseases. The Wilson lab uses modeling and population genomics to understand human demographic history.
Abstracts this author is presenting: