Broad researcher profile

After completing graduate school, computational scientist Miriah Meyer noticed a disappointing trend in data visualization. “Our field is usually about generalities,” she says. “We create algorithms or systems that are very general for some broad class of problems or types of data.” But Miriah saw that these solutions, especially those for the analysis of biological data, often didn’t help answer the specific questions of scientists using them.

As a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard Medical School investigator (and Broad Associate Member) Norbert Perrimon's lab, Serena Silver loved talking to her fellow post-docs about their projects and liked to help them come up with new ideas to try. Now, as Group Leader of RNAi Screening Projects at the Broad, Serena gets to talk to researchers about their projects for a living.

"I really enjoyed listening at lab meetings and thinking through the projects and the controls needed for an experiment - that I get to do that as my job now is extremely satisfying," she says.

A common thread stitches together Nick Patterson’s numerous careers: deep and joyful thinking about mathematics. He has cracked Cold War codes and run numbers on Wall Street. Now a computational biologist in the Broad’s Program in Medical and Population Genetics, he has helped colleagues analyze the migration and mixing of human populations. His work has spanned epochs and analyzed the population history of an entire subcontinent.

Kiran Musunuru, a clinical and research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and research affiliate at the Broad Institute, has received the Broad’s Lawrence H. Summers Fellowship for research for 2010-2011.

The year-long fellowship, named after former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, gives scientists an opportunity to advance their research at the Broad. Kiran intends to deepen his research into the causes of heart attacks, as well as the role that genetics plays in regulating levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood.