Gretchen Meller is a Project Director for the Vaccine Product Development Center at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).

Prior to joining IAVI, Meller spent 2 ½ years at Providence Health & Services as the Research Program Manager and was responsible for managing the research program at the enterprise level in support of regional research offices. Before that, she spent seven years as a Program Officer in Infectious Diseases at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; she was responsible for a therapeutic and vaccine development efforts in enteric and diarrheal diseases. Meller spent four years as a research scientist in Perinatal Studies at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. She started the program’s nucleic acid research facility, which pioneered the use of real-time PCR and microarray formats to analyze biomarkers in pregnancy diseases. As a staff scientist at Targeted Genetics Corp., she worked on bioassay development for gene therapy products and later on HIV vaccine scale-up projects. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neural development at the University of Oregon.

Meller received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Virginia. She is co-founder of Science on Tap, a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to sparking public interest in science.