Dr. Shirley Pepke is a computational biologist and principal scientist/owner at Lyrid LLC. She earned a BA with Honors from the University of Chicago and a PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara, both in physics. She has deep computational skills encompassing machine learning, dynamical systems model development, analysis, numerical simulations, and genomics. She has worked on diverse advanced software engineering projects including artificial intelligence applications at NASA, where she co-authored an open source release of a real-time diagnostic engine. Since the early 2000’s, Dr. Pepke’s work has focused on computational and systems biology research, especially in the context of high-throughput genomics, epigenomics, and transcriptomics. Her research in this area is routinely published in respected, peer reviewed journals. She was a staff computational scientist at the California Institute of Technology for several years. She has been an invited speaker for conferences at top universities. Dr. Pepke is well-known for her advocacy of clinically-oriented applications of genomics and machine learning, especially related to personalized medicine. She has performed research on combining these to inform cancer therapeutic development.
