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.

Christina Astley

M.D., Sc.D.

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Instructor

Eric Bartell

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Graduate Student

Eric Bartell is a third year graduate student in the Harvard Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics PhD program. He is interested in interrogating the genetics of height using derived phenotypes, and the interplay of selection on these phenotypes' genetic architectures.

Joanne Cole

Ph.D.

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Instructor

As a co-mentored postdoc in the labs of Joel Hirschhorn and Jose Florez, Joanne's work is focused on identifying genetic determinants and elucidating genetic architecture of dietary habits by taking multiple complementary approaches to phenotype derivation. Her interests lie in novel data-driven approaches to making sense out of large complex datasets of correlated normal human variation and linking these traits, such as diet, to human health and disease. She also applies similar methods and ideas to disease phenotypes, working currently with the devastating diabetes complication, diabetic kidney disease.

Rebecca Fine

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Graduate Student

Rebecca is a fifth-year PhD student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard.  She has been developing computational approaches for biological interpretation of human genetic data, including methods for gene set enrichment analysis and benchmarking gene prioritization methods.

Grzegorz Gorski

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Lab Manager

Yisong Huang

Ph.D.

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Biostatistician

Jessica Kremen

M.D.

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Instructor

Jenkai Miao

M.S.

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Biostatistician

 Jenkai joined Boston Children's Hospital as a biostatistician in 2018. His focus is in developing computational approaches and building statistical models for ongoing studies.

Priya Nakka

Ph.D.

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Postdoc

Priyanka (Priya) Nakka joined the Hirschhorn Lab as a post-doctoral fellow in 2019 after receiving her PhD in Computational Biology from Brown University.  Priya's doctoral research with Sohini Ramachandran focused on development of new methods to identify genes and gene subnetworks underlying complex traits and on identification of uniparental disomy from genomic data.  She is currently working on analyzing genomic and expression data in order to understand short stature and other related phenotypes.

Nora Renthal

M.D., Ph.D.

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Instructor

Nora Renthal 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 and Boston Children's Hospital. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Kristin Tsuo

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Research Assistant

Kathy Ushakov

Ph.D.

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Postdoc

Kathy Ushakov is a post-doctoral fellow whose research interests lie in bridging the gap between genomic variation and mechanisms underlying complex trait diseases, specifically BMI. She is taking advantage of single-cell RNA-seq data, pharmacologic agents and various computational approaches to understand biology through distinct cell populations and pathways. 

Sailaja Vedantam

Ph.D.

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Research Scientist

Sailaja is working on large-scale computational analysis of genome-wide association studies and is interested in understanding the role of both common and rare variants in complex traits.

Hannah Whitley

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Administrator

Hannah is a Program Coordinator who joined the lab in 2016. She supports the Hirschhorn Lab as well as the Division of Endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Jia Zhu

M.D.

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Pediatric Endocrinology Fellow

Mike Mendelson

M.D., Sc.M.

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Instructor

Frances Lopez

Ph.D.

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Assistant Professor