PEOPLE
Benjamin Neale
associate professor
Ben is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Associate Member in the Medical and Population Genetics program of the Broad Institute. He is also Director of Genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and Co-Director of Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute. His expertise centers on the development and application of statistical methodology and tools for analysis of large scale genetic data. Ben has played a central role in elucidating the genetic architecture of several psychiatric disorders, in particular schizophrenia, ADHD and autism, and his work continues to drive these discoveries through the use of increasingly large data sets and state of the art scalable software.
claire churchhouse
Senior advisor II
Claire completed a doctorate in the department of Statistics at Oxford University under the supervision of Jonathan Marchini, and came to the Broad Institute in 2012 as a postdoc with David Altshuler. A member of the Neale lab since 2015, she is responsible for helping to drive the scientific strategy of the group and for supporting all group members across a diverse range of projects.
Group Leaders
Raymond Walters
RESEARCH SCIENTIST & METHODS DEVELOPMENT GROUP LEADER
Raymond is leader of the Methods Development activities within the group. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical best practices for studying the genetics of psychological traits and disorders. Prior to joining the ATGU, Raymond earned his Ph.D. in Psychology in 2014 from the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Dr. Gitta Lubke. His current work includes development of a pipeline for rapid analysis of genome-wide SNP arrays in family-based data in the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and assessment of novel methods for quantifying the architecture of SNP effects across the genome.
DANIEL HOWRIGAN
Senior staff scientist
Dan oversees the SNP array and sequence analysis pipeline in the Neale lab, with a primary focus on furthering genetic discovery in complex psychiatric disease through collaborative partnerships and high-throughput data analysis. His post-doctoral research has been focused on deciphering the role of rare genetic variation in schizophrenia. Daniel received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Colorado, Boulder (supervised by Dr. Matthew Keller and Dr. Matthew McQueen). During his time in Colorado, his research investigated the detection of autozygosity (a genetic signature of inbreeding), and its role in general cognitive ability and schizophrenia liability.
Sam Bryant
Associate Director, Stanley Center data Management
Sam heads the Data Management group at the Stanley Center where he is responsible for managing over 500 terabytes of data. He is naturally curious, has a love for science and computers, and enjoys a good challenge. He's a 'data wrangler' - herds data to logical working groups and lower cost storage tiers; brings visibility to the data footprint at the Stanley Center; builds pipelines for the retrieval and sharing of data; and works with other 'data wranglers' to leverage knowledge, tips and tricks, storage strategies and more. He has played a key role in enabling the Neale lab's UK Biobank GWAS results to be rapidly and easily shared with the wider community.
Siwei Chen, PhD
Instructor
Siwei is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Dr. Benjamin Neale’s lab at ATGU and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Prior to joining the ATGU, Siwei earned her Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Cornell University, where her dissertation focused on identifying and interpreting disease mutations in the human protein interactome. Siwei is widely interested in studying the genetic basis of human diseases and is currently working on whole-exome/genome genetic variation analysis to understand how genetic risk translates into biological mechanisms.
Postdoctoral Associates
Georgia (Gio) Panagiotaropoulou, PhD
Gio is a joint research fellow in the Xavier Lab and the Neale Lab. With a background in electrical and computer engineering, she pursued a PhD in Medical Neurosciences at Charité University Hospital Berlin, during which she studied common variation in psychiatric disorders and investigated schemes for risk prediction. Her current work specializes in functional genomics with applications to various traits, focusing on identifying variant-to-trait pathways and developing schemes for their systematic biological validation.
Evan Giangrande, PhD
Evan is a postdoctoral research fellow co-advised by Drs. Benjamin Neale and Jordan Smoller. Prior to joining ATGU, he completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a concentration in quantitative psychology at the University of Virginia, and a clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Evan's dissertation examined gene-environment interplay across typical cognitive development. His postdoctoral research integrates electronic health record (EHR) and genomic data to investigate the etiology, course, and outcomes of psychotic disorders.
Franjo Ivankovic, PhD
Franjo is a research fellow at ATGU and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. They are advised by Benjamin Neale and co-advised by Jeremiah Scharf. Franjo recently completed a Ph.D. in genetics and genomics at the University of Florida, where they studied the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders like Tourette syndrome and OCD. Their interest is predominantly focused on the crossroads of statistics, genetics, anthropology, and psychiatry, and understanding of the complex relationships between genomes and phenomes.
cal Liao, PhD
Cal is a research fellow who joined the ATGU in March 2022, where he is co-advised by Drs. Benjamin Neale and Michael Talkowski. Cal completed a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from McGill University, focusing on identifying novel genetic and molecular insights for neuropsychiatric disorders. He is excited to investigate the genetics of bipolar disorder and has a strong interest in the functional characterization of genetic variation.
Julia Sealock, PhD
Julia is a research fellow who joined ATGU in May 2022. She completed a PhD in Human Genetics from Vanderbilt University where she studied the relationship between depression polygenic scores and lab traits extracted from electronic health records. As a research fellow in the Neale lab, she will be working on rare variant analysis of schizophrenia across diverse ancestries.
Hail Senior leadership
cotton seed
Senior Director, Hail engineering
Cotton Seed is a Senior Advisor to the Hail team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to joining the Broad, he did a PhD in Mathematics at Princeton University and spent over a decade building high-performance computing systems with a focus on advanced compiler technology at Connected Components Corp, Intel, and Reservoir Labs, among others.
Hail Team MEMBERS
Edmund Higham - Senior Software Engineer
Edmund is a senior software engineer on the Hail team.
Patrick Schultz - Principal Software Engineer
Patrick Schultz is a senior software engineer on the Hail team. Patrick is especially interested in the intersection of math and computer science and posted a NASA-funded book on his postdoctoral research in mathematics at MIT (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10258). He is excited to bring theory to practice for scientists by helping to build a better Hail.
Chris vittal - Software Engineer
Chris is a software engineer on the Hail team.
computational scientists & Associates
Christiana (Yijia) Liu
Christiana (Yijia) Liu is a Computational Associate I at the Neale lab. She recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA/MHS in Genetic Epidemiology, Cognitive Science, and Public Health Studies. Her research interests lie in applying statistical methods to study genetic variants and neurodevelopmental diseases. In my free time, she enjoys playing musical instruments, figure skating, and skiing.
Jackie goldstein
Jackie Goldstein is a Computational Scientist I in the Neale Lab at ATGU and the Broad Institute. She is leading a project to explore the feasibility and utility of phenotypes derived from longitudinal electronic health records to better understand the genetic architecture of common diseases, especially psychiatric illnesses. In her previous role, she was a Senior Software Engineer on the Hail team where she contributed to Hail Query and was the lead developer of Hail Batch, which is a multi-tenant, elastic batch job processing system for the cloud. Before her work on the Hail team, she was an Associate Computational Biologist in the Neale lab where she worked on analyzing data for the ExomeChip and PsychChip projects. She also was the lead investigator of a project that looked at the genetic architecture of clozapine-induced agranulocytosis.
Connor dowd
Connor is a Computational Associate I in the Neale Lab. He is interested in studying the impact of genetics on complex human traits, behavior, and disease through the analysis of genomic data. He graduated from Harvard College in 2023 with a BA in Applied Mathematics and Biology.
Grant Chau
Grant is an Associate Computational Biologist I in the Neale Lab. He is interested in leveraging numerical and statistical methods to estimate genetic contributions to psychological traits. He graduated from Northeastern University in 2022 with a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Wenhan Lu
Wenhan is a Computational Associate II in the Neale Lab. She earned her MS Degree in Biostatistics at Yale University in 2020. She is interested in analyzing genetic data for their impacts on human traits, as well as building pipelines for quality control and data virtualization.
Lindo Nkambule
Lindo is a Computational Associate II in the Neale Lab. He is interested in the analysis and visualization of genomic data. Lindo completed his Honours degree in Bioinformatics in 2019 and his project was on assessing the sensitivity and accuracy of various variant callers in African populations.
Bob Ye
Bob is a Computational Associate I in the Neale Lab. He completed his BS degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, as well as his MSE degree in Data Science at Johns Hopkins University in 2022. He is broadly interested in the development of pipelines and the analysis of genomic data.
Mary Yohannes
Mary is a Computational Associate II in the Neale Lab. She is originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She completed her undergraduate study at Clark University in 2019 and graduated from Boston University in 2020 with an MS in bioinformatics. She plans to work on projects that allow her to apply her classroom knowledges/experiences while acquiring new ones. She is interested in the application of bioinformatics in medicine and hopes to eventually go back and work in her home country.
Tetyana Zayats, PhD
Tetyana is a Researcher in the Neale Lab.
Administration & Project Management
Felecia Cerrato
Felecia Cerrato is an Associate Director, Nuerobiology Projects in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute. She supports the Neale lab in management of large-scale DNA sample aggregation, IRB approvals and compliance, genomic data generation, and data sharing efforts across many initiatives including the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (specifically in ADHD and OCD) and the Epi25 Collaborative. She completed an MPH in Public Health Genetics at the University of Washington, and she is PMP certified from the Project Management Institute.
Sinéad chapman
Sinéad is a Director, Global Genetics Project Management at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. She manages the Stanley Center Project Management team and works closely with Broad’s central administrative offices and Genomics Platform to facilitate collaborations, sample management, compliance, data generation and process optimization. Her primary areas of focus in the Neale lab are Stanley Global Psychosis Projects and Bipolar Disorder. She earned her BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Limerick, a MSc in Bioinformatics from Abertay University, and an ALM in Management and Operations from Harvard University. She is also PMP certified from the Project Management Institute.
Carla Hammond
Carla is a Program Manager who provides administrative support to Drs. Benjamin Neale and Konard Karczewski as well as their Labs in their administrative and research efforts as part of a growing administrative team spanning two institutions, Massachusetts General Hospital Research institute and the Broad Institute. Carla also manages all HR and Visa requests across the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit. Carla has been working at ATGU since August 2013.
Student and VISITing researchers
Jared Elenbaas
Jared is a resident physician scientist specializing in clinical pathology at Mass General Brigham. His graduate work involved understanding how the human disease risk locus, SVEP1, relates to disease using experimental and genetic techniques. He is interested in using human genomic and molecular trait data to understand common disease mechanisms.
Robel alemu, phd
Robel is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), co-advised by Drs. Patrick Turley (University of Southern California) and Daniel Benjamin (UCLA). He is also a Visiting Research Fellow in Dr. Benjamin Neale’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Robel holds a Master of Science in Biotechnology from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) and recently completed a Ph.D. in Quantitative Economics and Econometrics from Tufts University. His dissertation investigated the gene-environment interplay in smoking behavior among older adults in the United States. Robel’s postdoctoral research explores the reasons behind the limited portability of polygenic scores (PGSs) across genetically inferred ancestral populations. He is also interested in advancing computational tools that improve the accuracy of PGSs for a wide range of complex traits.
Zade akras
Zade is a second-year medical student in the Harvard-MIT HST program and finished undergrad at Yale, where he majored in Math.
Daniel Lazarev
Daniel is a Graduate Student in the Neale lab. He is developing a method based on the Maximum Entropy Principle to construct multilayer SNP-phenotype networks given GWAS data. He is generally excited about how simple yet powerful variational principles, such as Maximum Entropy, can be developed, extended and applied to problems in biology and medicine. Daniel graduated from Yeshiva University in 2016 with a Bachelor's in Mathematics and Physics, and is on leave from medical school at Stony Brook University to focus on research and to pursue a PhD. For more information, check out his website.