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.

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).

John Baronas

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Lab Manager & Research Assistant

John joined the lab in 2019 as a research assistant and works primarily with Dr. Renthal to investigate the genetics of chondrocyte biology and pediatric skeletal growth.

Eric Bartell

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Graduate Student

Anders Eliasen

M.Sc., Ph.D.

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Postdoctoral Fellow

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Anders joined the lab in 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. He is interested in computational methods for genome-wide association studies and is currently working with genetic data to examine how a genetic predisposition for obesity influence childhood traits predating the onset of obesity.

Samuel Gavronski

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Research Assistant

​Samuel joined the lab as a research assistant during the summer of 2022. His research interests include studying neuronal mechanisms by which some pharmacological agents induce weight loss and also understanding the genetic basis of chondrocyte development. Samuel recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and a minor in Chemistry.

Yisong Huang

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Biostatistician

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Nora Renthal

M.D., Ph.D.

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Instructor

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.

Sailaja Vedantam

Ph.D.

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Research Scientist

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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 Senior 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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Instructor

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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.