Drs. Natalie Stanley (secondary), Jerry Guintivano (secondary), and Robbie Mealer (joint) have joined the Department of Genetics.
Dr. Stanley earned her BS in Mathematics from Dickinson College in 2013, followed by a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2018. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Immunology at Stanford University (2018-2020). Dr. Stanley was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science with membership in the Computational Medicine Program in January 2021. Dr. Stanley’s research is broadly focused on single-cell bioinformatics, computational and systems immunology, and developing algorithms for representing and understanding graph-based data, such as flow and mass cytometry. Her lab particularly leverages techniques from numerical linear algebra, and graph signal processing to address these problems. Her aim is to apply the methods developed to flow and mass cytometry datasets generated from large clinical cohorts.
Dr. Guintivano earned his BS in Bioinformatics at Baylor University in 2008 and PhD in 2014 in Human Genetics from University of Maryland, Baltimore. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UNC-Chapel Department of Psychiatry (2014-2018) and was appointed as Research Assistant Professor in the same department in 2018. Jerry’s research is focused on the genetics of psychiatric disorders, namely postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum psychosis (PP). With a well-defined window of symptom onset and an increased heritability compared to major depressive disorder (MDD) outside of the perinatal period, PPD genetics can provide insights into MDD, but also how differential responses to hormones can be driven by common genetic variation.
Dr. Mealer is a physician-scientist who obtained his BS in Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Montana State University (2005) and both his M.D and PhD (in Neuroscience) from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (2014). He completed his residency training in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Adult Psychiatry Program and then joined the faculty initially as Instructor, and then was promoted to Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he obtained a NIH K-award, a NARSAD, and served as the Director for Precision Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Program at MGH in the Center for Precision Psychiatry. He was most recently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. His primary appointment is as tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry.