Associate Professor Irene Gallego Romero studies the contributions of gene regulation to human diversity and evolution, and its implications for personalised medicine. She is currently a principal research fellow at St Vincent's Institute in Melbourne, where she leads the Human Evolutionary Genomics group, and was previously Senior Lecturer in Systems Genomics at the University of Melbourne, and Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. As a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow she established a panel of non-human primate iPSC lines as model systems for comparative genomics and studies of human evolution. Since moving to Australia in 2017 her research has focused on underserved populations from Island Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the people of the Indonesian archipelago.