Karen H Miga

Karen Elizabeth Hayden Miga is an American geneticist who co-leads the Telomere-to-Telomore (T2T) consortium that released fully complete assembly of the human genome in March 2022. She is an associate professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Associate Director of Human Pangenomics at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. She was named as "One to Watch" in the 2020 Nature's 10 and one of Time 100's most influential people of 2022.

Research and career In 2012, Miga joined the laboratory of David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At UCSC she combined computational and experimental approaches. There she leads the telomere-to-telomere (T2T) consortium, a community based effort that seeks to fully sequence and assemble the human genome. She makes use of the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION sequencer, which analyses DNA by detecting changes in current flow when DNA passes through nanopores in a membrane. This map will support the development of personalized therapeutics. where she discussed the future of equitable genomics research with former President Bill Clinton, U2 lead singer Bono, and Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Ghebreyesus. 2023, Karen Miga was named a 2023 Searle Scholar to study uncharted heterochromatin regions of the human genome.

Selected publications