Melissa Kinney Email & Phone Number

I love puzzles. I love to dig into data to discover the secrets of biology. I am driven by the grand challenge of engineering cell therapies to impact patients. As a biomedical engineer, my diverse expertise allows me to uniquely integrate within and lead cross-functional teams. In the wet lab, I developed a platform to standardize stem cell biomanufacturing and decreased variability by almost 80%. I also synthesized 150+ high throughput datasets into a computational pipeline and led a team of subject matter experts to validate a novel gene target across 3 species. As an assistant professor at UW-Madison, I led a team of engineers, scientists, and clinicians to model hematopoiesis in native tissues in order to develop bioinspired strategies for engineering off the shelf cell therapies.I also enjoy the creative side of science. I have become passionate about developing new data visualizations and accessible media to communicate complex biological data and ideas. Through my computational biology work, I consulted and advised biologists and clinicians on the analysis, visualization, and impact of the data and contributed mechanistic insights to 4 publications in journals with broad readership (impact factors 10+). I have authored 13 research and 6 review articles with 1000+ citations collectively and presented our research at 16 invited seminars at international universities.Reach out if you want to talk about stem cells, biological big data, graphic design, or food blogs/baking!Professional skillsProject management | stem cell differentiation | disease modeling | drug screening | cell characterization | in vitro assay development | cell sequencing analysis | bioinformatics | R programming | statistical modeling | data visualizationDomain knowledgePluripotent stem cells | computational biology | hematopoiesis | immunology | developmental biology | cell & molecular biology | organoids | regenerative medicine | tissue engineering | cell biomanufacturing

Listed skills include Tissue Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Stem Cells, Cell Culture, and 21 others.