Dr. Melissa Smith earned her Bachelors’ degrees from the University of California, San Diego, a PhD in Virology from Harvard University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Institut Pasteur and UCSD’s Center for AIDS Research. Joining PacBio, Dr. Smith pioneered single-molecule sequencing methods for characterizing viral populations and immune repertoires. She returned to academia as the Associate Director of Technology Development at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Smith joined the University of Louisville in 2020, where she now leads a team developing genomics tools to study host-pathogen interactions. In 2024, she co-founded Clareo Biosciences. Clareo Bio provides custom immune-based and viral profiling to identify predictive biomarkers for response prediction and further our understanding of variable responses to gene therapy. Her work is dedicated to leveraging genomic diversity to develop effective precision therapies for all.