Jean Monlong, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar in the Computational Genomics Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on hard-to-detect genomic variants, such as structural variants. In the past few years, he has been developing methods and using pangenomes and long-read sequencing to study variation in human genomes. Previously, during his PhD in McGill University (Montreal, Canada), Monlong analyzed short-read sequencing data to characterize copy-number variants in the most challenging regions of the human genome and in genomes of patients suffering from epilepsy or cancer. Before that, he developed one of the first methods to detect splicing QTLs, i.e. genomic variants associated with changes in the alternative splicing of genes, thanks to RNA sequencing data.