Professor Melanie Bahlo is the “Healthy Development and Ageing” Theme Leader at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). A statistical geneticist and bioinformatician with over 20 years’ experience, she leads a lab that seeks to identify genetic risk factors in neurological and retinal disorders using genomic-driven approaches. In addition to conducting studies, Professor Bahlo and her lab develop novel algorithms and software to help identify genetic risk factors, applying these bespoke methods to publicly available, large-scale data, including the UK Biobank as well as locally recruited cohorts. Her current research interests include: mutations caused by expansion of repetitive nucleotide sequences, RNA editing, and using genetic variation to study modifiable and heritable risk for diseases including epilepsy, retinal disorders, ataxia, Parkinson’s disease and dementia.