Ana Pombo employs a combination of advanced genomics and imaging techniques, computational biology, and statistical analysis to understand how the physical positioning of genes and their regulatory sequences affects their activity. She has pioneered groundbreaking methods that provide unique insights and have transformed our ability to study genome organization. 

Pombo notably developed Genome Architecture Mapping (GAM), an innovative technique that maps the positions of every part of the genome relative to every other part of the genome within a nucleus and allows scientists to determine how different parts of the genome interact with each other in three-dimensional space. This approach has provided unprecedented insights into the intricate ways chromosomes fold and interact, revealing organizational principles and novel genomic interactions that were previously invisible to researchers. Pombo’s work focuses largely on how genome organization relates to human health and disease. She is interested in how genome structure may hold epigenetic memory of an external insult, such as exposure to a drug of addiction. Pombo hopes to uncover how this happens, with the hope that her research can contribute to novel diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics.