DA  Research Team

Melanie Spencer, PhD

 

Dr. Spencer is the AVP of Clinical and Outcomes Research for Carolinas HealthCare System. She earned her MBA from Queens University, Certificate in Epidemiology from UNC Chapel Hill and her PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from UNC-Charlotte.

 

Dr. Spencer leads our group of research scientists, health services researchers, biostatisticians, database developers and project managers.  Our core mission is to develop, conduct and support research that improves patient care and outcomes and will be directly applied to benefit our patients.

 

Her Ph.D. and postdoctoral work focused on the human gastrointestinal and cystic fibrosis microbiota and included analysis of the relationships among human-associated microbes, disruptions to the microbial system, metabolomics, clinical data, nutrition and health.  For the last 4 years, she has guest lectured for nutritional biochemistry and bioinformatics graduate classes at UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Charlotte. Identifying biologically and clinically relevant information from large, dimensional datasets has been a common theme in her research.  Upon joining Carolinas HealthCare System, she recognized how sequencing technology and risk modeling could offer a solution that applies bench science and analytics to the problem of healthcare acquired infections.  At CHS, she has lead research to apply bacterial genomics to understand CRE infection and has established collaborations with The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and with The University of North Carolina Bioinformatics and Genomics Department for this work.  These experiences combined with her training in epidemiology have led to her interest in understanding how microbial genomics can inform infection prevention and control and her research focus on bringing sequencing innovations to the clinical setting to improve outcomes for our patients. She also have a strong interest in disparities research, including behavioral, socioeconomic and biological sources that lead to differences in health.

 

Dr. Spencer is currently working on the FIGHT (Fighting Infections with Genomics to prevent Hospital Transmissions) study and CARE-2D. Her favorite thing to do in Charlotte is visit the U.S. National Whitewater Center for kayaking or she enjoys playing tennis. Her favorite restaurant in Charlotte is Halcyon.