Molly Gale Hammell, PhD, is an associate professor in the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The over-arching goal of the Gale Hammell lab is to iterate between wet and dry bench approaches in order to better understand how transposons and endogenous retroviruses in our genome are normally controlled, so that we might better understand how transposons contribute to human disease. The lab specializes in developing novel algorithms for integrative genomics, from bulk to single-cell sequencing data, with a special focus on the probabilistic handling of reads from repetitive regions of the genome (transposon genomics). Experimental work in the lab focuses on understanding the connections between retrotransposon de-silencing and neurodegenerative disease, using a mix of bulk and single-cell genomics approaches.

Dr. Gale Hammell is a Milton Cassel Scholar of the Rita Allen Foundation and a Ben Barres Investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.