Biography

Claire Malley is a bioinformatician in the Stem Cell Translation Laboratory (SCTL) within NCATS' Division of Preclinical Innovation. She joined NCATS in 2018 to serve as a dedicated data scientist for SCTL biologists, focusing on its ongoing high-throughput sequencing projects. Malley analyzes single-cell and population-based genetic data for insight into stem cell differentiation and changes in gene expression by cell type, protocol and disease state. She also spearheads an effort to create the induced pluripotent stem cells portal, an online repository of validated and reproducible datasets and protocols. Malley strives to bridge the gap between an abundance of data and answers to complex biological questions.

Before joining the SCTL, Malley worked as a research data analyst in the Asthma and Allergy Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where she carried out analysis of human whole genome sequencing data in a study of atopic dermatitis and eczema herpeticum patients.

Malley received her M.S. in plant biology and bioinformatics from Northwestern University in 2016, and her B.S. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan in 2012. She has studied both human and plant genomics, lending a unique interdisciplinary perspective to her current translational work at NCATS.

Research Topics

Malley’s research interests are focused on bioinformatic analysis methods of human sequencing data, including the whole genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. Ongoing work with the SCTL includes single-cell RNA analysis of iPSCs to study the effects of cell cycle state in the differentiation process of neuroprogenitor cells. In data analysis work, the programming languages R and Python are of particular interest, as well as parallel computing approaches on Linux cluster systems to handle large-scale processing and data mining.