New Faculty: Irene Kaplow

Irene Kaplow excavates historical records from genomes.

Kaplow joined as a new faculty member in August 2024, but a few years before, she had worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Andreas Pfenning, associate professor in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department.

As a postdoctoral fellow, she investigated how similar traits evolve across different species, which is known as convergent evolution.

After her time as a postdoctoral fellow, she worked as a research scientist at Duke University, where she investigated how DNA editing techniques can be used to mitigate heart failure.

As a new member of Biological Sciences and Computational Biology, Irene is enthusiastic about both departments' commitment to fundamental molecular biology research and support of interdisciplinary approaches to investigating questions in this area.  Irene is enjoying starting a hybrid computational-experimental lab that will recruit biologists with both backgrounds and give them the opportunity to expand their skill set to better enable them to do interdisciplinary biology research.  Irene is also excited about participating in Pittsburgh's strong molecular evolution community, including the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine and the Molecular Evolution Laboratory Discussions.

Kaplow plans to teach classes that blend machine learning and biology. She said she hopes to help students learn how they can apply machine learning models to different areas of research.

Outside of work, Irene enjoys board games, swimming, and being involved at her synagogue.  When traveling to new cities, she enjoys visiting local museums, and she is excited to continue exploring Pittsburgh's museum scene.  As someone who compares hundreds of vertebrate animals in her research, she does not have a favorite animal but is always interested in learning interesting facts about friends' favorites.