Shelly Wanamaker

Originally from Massachusetts, Shelly joins us from the West Coast where she spent the past 10 years. After completing her B.S. at Simmons College in Boston, she continued as a Research Technician in Marc Vidal’s lab at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB), Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston where she became fascinated with big data and how network biology brings resolution to genotype-to-phenotype relationships. In 2011, Shelly joined Joe Ecker’s Genomic Analysis Lab at the Salk Institute in San Diego as a Research Assistant and was inspired to pursue a Ph.D. while developing a new high throughput assay for mapping protein interactions (CrY2H-seq). Shelly began the Biological Sciences Ph.D. program in 2013 where she continued in Joe Ecker’s lab now focused on applying CrY2H-seq to understanding protein interactions that directly contribute to gene regulation in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Towards the end of the program, she became interested in how systems biology could be used in applied research and completed a year-long NSF Graduate Research Internship at NOAA’s Northwest Fishery Science Center using omics to investigate how physiology and genetics in marine invertebrates are affected by ocean acidification. She returned to San Diego in the summer of 2018, completing her dissertation “High resolution molecular networks from novel ‘omics’ approaches elucidate survival strategies in organisms from land to sea”, and received my Ph.D. In the Fall of 2018, Shelly began as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Steven Roberts’ lab in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at University of Washington where she studied how the environment impacts marine animals at the physiological and molecular systems level. She conducted experiments that simulated various ocean conditions and used omics technologies (like epigenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) in combination with physiological assays to measure animal response. In March of 2021, Shelly started her current position as a Research Scientist at Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute.