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.
Melanie Babinski, MD​
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Attending Physician
Melanie Babinski is an attending physician in the division of Endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital. She joined the lab in the summer of 2024 as a postdoctoral fellow, and has continued her research as junior faculty. Her research applies genomic and computational approaches to pediatric endocrine disorders, with a focus on the genetics of short stature and the behavioral and genomic subtyping of childhood obesity.
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.
Imogene Gaede​
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Undergraduate Student
Imogene joined the lab in Summer 2025 and is currently an undergraduate student at UCLA. As part of the HEDGE analysis team, she studies the phenotypic consequences of genetic variants associated with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) by conducting PheWAS analyses of both common and rare variants using large biobank datasets, e.g. All of Us.
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.
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).
Alice Wang
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Graduate Student
Alice is a master's student in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. She is working with Joel and Aishwarya on evaluating strategies for aggregating rare genetic variants and assessing their associations with complex traits.
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.