Dr. Fei Chen is currently a Core Faculty member at the Broad Institute, and assistant professor at Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

During the course of his doctoral research, Chen co-invented expansion microscopy, a breakthrough technique that allows for super-resolution imaging of biological samples with conventional light microscopes. As an independent Fellow at the Broad, his lab continued to pioneer novel tools at the intersection of genomics and microscopy to uniquely illuminate biological pathways and function. These include, Slide-seq, a novel technology for transcriptome-wide gene expression profiling with near-single-cell spatial resolution.

At Harvard and as a Core Member of the Broad Institute, Dr. Chen’s laboratory sets out to build a set of tools which will bridge single-cell genomics with space and time – to enable discoveries of where cell types are localized within intact tissues, when relevant transcriptional modules are active. To do this, the lab is developing novel technologies at the intersection of microscopy, genomics, and synthetic biology.  We are applying these tools to learn organizational principles governing neurodevelopment, and cellular mechanisms of disorganization during neuronal injury and disease.

He obtained his Ph.D. in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Ed Boyden. Dr. Chen was a Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute. His awards include the National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award and the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award.

Dr. Hanchard received his medical degree with Honours from the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, and his D.Phil. in Clinical Medicine and Human Genetics from the University of Oxford, UK, where he was a Rhodes Scholar in the laboratory of Prof. Dominic Kwiatkowski. Thereafter he completed his clinical training in the United States as a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic and as a clinical geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine. His lab focuses on using quantitative and integrative genomics to explore complex pediatric disease traits, particularly in human populations of diverse ancestries, emphasizing the interplay of population genetics and disease susceptibility. Dr. Hanchard’s current portfolio includes studies of congenital cardiovascular diseases, sickle cell disease, severe childhood malnutrition, and pediatric HIV, and he has published broadly on the genetic basis of rare birth defects and Mendelian syndromes. These studies are supported through extensive collaborations across Africa, the Caribbean, and the US. He is the Chair of the Genome Analysis working group of the Human Health and Heredity in Africa (H3Africa) consortium, and a former American Society of Human Genetics Early-career Director. In January 2021, Dr. Hanchard moved his lab to the NIH as an intramural investigator in the Center for Precision Health Research in NHGRI, where he leads the Childhood Complex Disease Genomics Section.

Simone Immler is Professor of Genetics and Reproduction at the University of East Anglia, UK. She was awarded both an European Research Council Starting Grant and an European Research Council Consolidator Grant and received a prestigious Wallenberg Academy Fellowship. Dr. Immler’s research focuses on the genetics and genomics of male reproduction and fertility and her lab works on zebrafish and humans. The main focus of her research lies on the mechanisms and processes occurring in germ cells particularly at the stages between meiosis and fertilisation and syngamy. She uses a wide range of tools including mathematical modelling, experimental manipulations and genomics to study the importance of selection on male gametes. Recent findings from her lab overturned the prevailing idea that the haploid sperm genome is transcriptionally silent by providing clear evidence of a link between sperm genotype and sperm phenotype as well as between sperm phenotype and offspring fitness. Dr. Immler earned her MSc from the University of Basel, Switzerland and her PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. She spent time as a Research Fellow and Associate Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden before returning to the UK in 2017.

Elinor Karlsson, PhD, is associate professor in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and director of Vertebrate Genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research combines new technology, community science and the power of evolution to investigate diseases and discover the origins of exceptional mammalian traits.  Dr. Karlsson’s research includes Zoonomia (zoonomiaproject.org), an international effort to compare the genomes of over 240 mammals, from the African Yellow-spotted Rock Hyrax to the Woodland Dormouse, to identify critically important segments of DNA. In collaboration with Zoo New England, she is developing tools that uses genomics to tackle heritable diseases, like heart disease, common in some zoo populations. Dr. Karlsson has a special interest in dog genetics, and her international Darwin’s Ark project (DarwinsArk.org) invites all dog owners to enroll their dogs in an open data research project exploring the genetic basis of dog behavior, as well as diseases such as compulsive disorders, food allergies and cancer.

Elinor received her B.A. in biochemistry/cell biology and her B.F.A. (Bachelor of Fine Arts) from Rice University, and earned her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Pardis Sabeti at Harvard University before starting her research group at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2014.

Dr. Trevor Lawley is a Faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (www.lawleylab.com) and the Chief Scientific Officer of Microbiotica (www.microbiotica.com). Trevor’s research is focused on developing concepts, methods and tools to enable basic discoveries and translation of medicines and diagnostics from the human microbiome. His science uses large-scale genomics and data driven approaches in patient cohorts, underpinned by metagenomic analysis, microbial culturing and machine learning, to investigate the biology of human microbes that are associated with health and a range of diseases, syndromes and developmental disorders. Trevor has trained scientists who have established independent academic research labs and have pioneered the human microbiome biotechnology sector. Research by Trevor and his students has been published in Nature, Nature Immunology, Nature Genetics, Cell and Nature Biotechnology, and has been featured on BBC, CNN news and highlighted in The Economist. In December 2016, Trevor spun out the biotech company Microbiotica to develop live bacterial therapeutics, biomarkers and microbiome-based technologies focused on treating patients with autoimmune diseases and cancers. Microbiotica is developing live bacterial therapeutic products, defined consortia of bacteria, as novel medicines for ulcerative colitis patients and melanoma immunotherapy patients.

Zach Lippman is a Professor of Plant Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. His research group integrates genetics, development, genomics, and genome editing to study flowering and flower production in nature and agriculture. Taking advantage of natural and induced variation in these processes in tomato and related Solanaceae plants, Lippman’s group has shown how stem cell proliferation and maturation underlie diversity in vegetative and reproductive shoot systems. Identifying the genes and mechanisms underlying this diversity have led to broader exploration on the roles of structural variation, gene regulation, and epistasis in development, domestication, and breeding. Based on these discoveries, Lippman is developing and applying innovative concepts and tools for crop improvement. His contributions to plant genetics and genome editing were recognized with receiving a MacArthur Fellowship and the US National Academy of Sciences Award in Food and Agriculture.

Dr Mary J O’Connell, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Comparative and Molecular Evolution at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her laboratory is focussed on uncovering the molecular mechanisms that underpin changes in phenotype and function. Her work is computational in nature and involves close collaboration with field, molecular and cellular biologists. She develops and applies phylogenomic and comparative genomic approaches to uncover patterns and processes of evolution that underpin phenotypic diversity and adaptation. This involves sampling, sequencing, assembling and annotating genomes of diverse species, followed by the large scale comparative genomics involved in understanding the evolution and adaptation of species to their environments, from to seals and caecilia.

Steve Reilly is an Assistant Professor Genetics at Yale University School of Medicine. The Reilly lab builds experimental functional genomics and computational tools to understand how non-coding genetic variants lead to phenotypes. He is especially interested in variants that have undergone evolutionary selection in ancient global populations, but remain impactful for modern human traits and health. Dr. Reilly is an member of large-scale scientific consortia such as ENCODE and Zoonomia, where he has applied high-throughput reporter assays and CRISPR screens to determine the regulatory impact of human variation. His lab seeks to build the requisite multi-dimensional datasets and machine learning approaches to better understand the logic of cis-regulatory grammar.

Pardis Sabeti is a Professor at Harvard University, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and a Howard Hughes Investigator. Her computational genomic lab has contributed to widely varying fields — including human and microbial genomics, information theory, and rural infectious disease surveillance and education efforts in West Africa. She completed a B.S. at MIT, M. Sc. and D.Phil at Oxford University, and M.D. summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School. Sabeti is a National Academy of Medicine member, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, the National Academy of Sciences Richard Lounsbery Award, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award winner for Natural Science, TIME magazine “Person of the Year” as one of the Ebola fighters, and TIME’s 100 Most Influential. She is the host of ‘Against All Odds’ included as part of AP stats classes nationwide, and is the lead singer of the rock band Thousand Days.

Olga Troyanskaya is a Professor at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation. Her lab employs machine learning and statistical modeling techniques to decode genomes and understand cellular specificity, genotype-phenotype relationships, and evolution. Through developing integrative analyses and modeling of complex molecular-level changes captured via diverse functional genomics techniques, including experimental and clinical data, the approaches enable systems-level molecular views of human health and complex diseases. Dr. Troyanskaya received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the Howard Wentz faculty award, and the Blavatnik Finalist Award. She has also been honored with the Ira Herskowitz Award from The Genetics Society of America and is the 2011 recipient of the Overton Prize in computational biology.

Dr. Alicia Zhou is the Chief Science Officer at Color. She is responsible for leading research collaborations with academic institutions, biopharmaceutical companies, and large population initiatives. She and her team initiates and executes academic collaborations towards driving improved population health outcomes. In addition, Dr. Zhou is an active part of Color’s market development team for population genomics and population research. Dr. Zhou received her Ph.D. at Harvard and performed her postdoctoral work at UCSF with an emphasis on cancer biology.