Wouter Meuleman’s research focuses on how the regulatory genome is organized, and what the functional implications of this organization are. His long term research goal is to make “augmented genomics” a reality: a new field in which the work of genome scientists is supplemented – not replaced! – by large-scale visualization and data-driven machine intelligence.

Although technological developments have made it possible to construct genome-wide maps of regulatory elements across hundreds of human cellular conditions, the scale and complexity precludes routine utility of such maps. Wouter develops computational and machine learning approaches to reduce their complexity, while maximally retaining relevant information.

The approaches developed by Wouter are often directly applicable to research areas and fields beyond genomics, including but not limited to geospatial data and even blockchain analyses.

Most recently, Wouter was a Principal Investigator at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences. Prior to joining Altius, Wouter did postdoctoral work at MIT and the Broad Institute. He obtained his PhD in Computational Biology from Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Netherlands.

In 2020, Wouter was the recipient of the NIH NHGRI Genomic Innovator Award.