Peter Skene has more than 15 years of research experience studying mammalian genome regulation, focusing on transcriptomics and epigenomics in both academic and industry settings. His interest in gene regulation began during his undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the University of Cambridge. Peter received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh for his work elucidating the impact of methylated and non-methylated CpG dinucleotides in genome function and compartmentalization. This work, under the mentorship of Dr. Adrian Bird, highlighted how failure of these epigenetic processes can impact human health. He moved to Seattle as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the laboratories of Steve Henikoff and Mark Groudine. Here, Peter transitioned to NGS-technology development, including inventing a single nucleotide resolution method for genome-wide mapping of protein-DNA interactions.

In his most recent role, Peter led the Hyb & Seq Chemistry team at Nanostring Technologies in the development of a novel hybridization-based clinical sequencing technology. Now as the Director of Molecular Biology at the Allen Institute for Immunology, he and his colleagues will apply single cell technologies to profile gene regulation pathways of the immune system to further understand disease states and identify potential points of therapeutic intervention.