HIRSCHHORN LAB
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Boston Children's Hospital · Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard · Harvard Medical School
PEOPLE
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Joel Hirschhorn
M.D., Ph.D.
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Principal Investigator
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Joel is the chief of the Division of Endocrinology at Boston Children's Hospital and is the Concordia Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Angeliki Angelidi
M.D., Ph.D.
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Postdoctoral Fellow
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Angeliki joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2021 and has a great interest in Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism. She is currently working on genomic and metabolomic data to combine genetics and metabolomics for the identification of metabolites as potential correlates, predictors, or ideally causal mediators of obesity, diabetes, and glycemic traits.
John Baronas​
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Lab Manager & Research Assistant
John joined the lab in 2019 as a research assistant and works primarily with Nora to investigate the genetics of chondrocyte biology and pediatric skeletal growth.
Mali DiMeo
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Research Assistant
Mali joined the lab in the spring of 2023 and works with Jia to investigate the genetics and pathophysiology of PCOS and other reproductive endocrine disorders using computational genetic methods. She has a Master's degree in Bioinformatics and a Bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology.
Anders Eliasen
M.Sc., Ph.D.
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Postdoctoral Fellow​
Anders joined the lab in 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. His research focuses on developing and applying computational methods for genome-wide association studies to understand how genetic variation shapes human traits. He is an active member of the GIANT height working group, where he contributes to gene and variant prioritization and to advancing methods that link genetic signals to their underlying biological mechanisms.
Wen He​
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Postdoctoral Fellow
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Wen joined the lab in 2023 as a postdoctoral research fellow. She is interested in rare-disease genetics, especially Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, delayed puberty, and related reproductive disorders. She led multi-ancestry GWAS and rare-variant burden analyses across large biobanks e.g. All of Us, and international cohorts, and plays key roles in international consortium, e.g. HEDGE and DPGen, to improve understanding, genetic diagnosis, and care.
Yisong Huang
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Biostatistician
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Yisong is a Biostatistician at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she applies computational methods and data analysis to support medical research. Her current work focus on GWAS, metabolomics, and diabetes, with a strong interest in understanding the genetic basis of cardiometabolic health in youth.
Varun Lingadal​
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Research Assistant
Varun joined the lab in the summer of 2023 as a Research Assistant. He is currently working with Jia to investigate the genetics of PCOS and with Aishwarya, Anders, and Joel to identify causal variants and genes associated with height and BMI. Varun graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology modified with Mathematics.
Mijia Ma​
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Graduate Student
Mijia is a master’s student in Computational Biology and Quantitative Genetics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is working with Joel, Angeliki, Yisong, and Iris on GWAS of known and unknown metabolites to identify potential biomarkers for cardiometabolic diseases.
Zakora Moore
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Graduate Student
Zakora is a master’s student in biomedical engineering at Tufts University. She joined the lab in the summer of 2024 as a research assistant. She primarily works on validating the results of the GIANT consortium by computationally examining how much information from a PGS developed in one ancestry is applicable to other ancestries.
Iris Pang
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Undergraduate Student
Iris Pang is an undergraduate student at MIT, majoring in Molecular Biology and Computer Science. She is working with Joel, Angeliki, and Yisong on combining genetics and metabolomics for the identification of metabolites as potential predictors or correlates for cardiometabolic conditions.
Genesis Perez-Melara
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Graduate Student
Genesis Joined the lab as a research assistant in the summer of 2024. She is working with Jia on the genetic risk factors for PCOS and their impact on perinatal outcomes using computational genetic methods. Genesis graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2019 and is currently a 4th year medical student at HMS.
Aishwarya Seth
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Bioinformatician I
Aishwarya holds a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins, with a strong foundation in computer science. Since joining the Hirschhorn Lab in Summer 2023, she has served as the computational lead, designing and optimizing pipelines for biobank-scale genomic studies and rare variant discovery, and coordinating analytical strategy across collaborative projects. Her work leverages large, multi-cohort datasets to characterize the genetic architecture of complex traits and disease, including anthropometric traits (GIANT consortium) and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (HEDGE consortium).
Melica Zekavat
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Undergraduate Student
Melica is a senior undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute pursing a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering and minoring in both Computer and Data Science. She is working with Joel and Aishwarya on developing a comprehensive pipeline for gene enrichment analysis to improve future rare variant analyses of height and other phenotypes.
Connie Zhao
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Graduate Student
Connie Zhao is a master’s student in biostatistics at the University of Michigan. She joined the lab in 2025 as a research assistant and studies how genetic variants identified through GWAS contribute to complex traits. Her work focuses on integrating functional genomic data and fine-mapping results to understand tissue-specific regulatory mechanisms and identify variants with potential causal roles.
Christina M. Astley
M.D., Sc.D.​
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Assistant Professor
Christina is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and physician-scientist in the Divisions of Endocrinology and Computational Epidemiology at Boston Children's Hospital. Her research focuses on the development of innovative methods to understand individual- and population-level disease dynamics (e.g multiple omics, global digital health data streams).
AFFILIATES
Mary Frances Lopez
Ph.D.
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Assistant Professor
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Mary Frances is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and Staff Research Scientist in the Division of Endocrinology at the Boston Children's. Hospital. Her research interests center around the hormonal influences on neonatal growth, nutrition, and metabolism. Her research has studied the effects of insulin-like growth factor 2 on growth and metabolism, and more recently has focused on mechanisms by which neuronal circuits regulate body weight and contribute to obesity.
Nora Renthal
M.D., Ph.D.
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Assistant Professor
Nora is a pediatric endocrinologist and basic science investigator interested in the genetics of pediatric skeletal growth. She joined the Hirschhorn Lab as an instructor in 2019 after endocrine fellowship at Boston Children's Hospital. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. [Nora Renthal Research Group}
Jia Zhu
M.D.
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Assistant Professor
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Jia is a pediatric endocrinologist and computational genetics investigator. Her research interests are in understanding the biological pathways and mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of common reproductive endocrine disorders through computational genetic methods, with a focus on pediatric antecedents to adult disorders.