Irene Gallego Romero

Dr Irene Gallego Romero studies the contributions of gene regulatory change to human and primate evolution. She is currently based at the School of BioSciences, and is a core member of Melbourne Integrative Genomics at the University of Melbourne. As a postdoctoral researcher she was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Trust Fellowship to establish pluripotent stem cell lines from non-human apes as a resource for comparative primate genomics and the study of human evolution uniqueness. Since moving to Australia in 2017 her research has focused on the evolutionary challenges of peopling Island Southeast Asia, with particular focus on the population genomics of the Indonesian archipelago and the interactions between Homo sapiens and other regional hominin species.