Irina Astrovskaya joined the Simons Foundation in 2017 to develop pipelines for identification and functional annotation of mutations and structural variants in next-generation sequencing data. Her role is to analyze genomic data in the SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research) cohort and to derive the annotated list of mutations with prioritization of potentially causative variants for further review of the clinical team.

Prior to joining the foundation, Astrovskaya completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland with Mihai Pop, where she worked on metagenomics-related computational problems and explored the effect of diarrhea and antibiotics on human gut microbiota. Astrovskaya has a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia State University, where she developed the Viral Spectrum Assembler (ViSpA) to infer hepatitis C virus (HCV) quasispecies and estimate their relative frequencies from the next-generation sequencing data. She also holds an M.S. in applied mathematics from Belarus State University.