Maria Costanzo, Ph.D.

Maria Costanzo works in the Program in Medical and Population Genetics under the direction of Noel Burtt. She is the manager of content and community for the Type 2 Diabetes Knowledge Portal an open-access resource for human genetic information on type 2 diabetes (T2D) with the goal of catalyzing the clinical translation of genetic discoveries. The Portal, which offers both precomputed results and custom analysis tools, is built and maintained by engineers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as part of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Type 2 Diabetes (AMP T2D), a large collaborative effort that brings together the National Institutes of Health, five major pharmaceutical companies, and three large non-profits. The Portal is a central repository for data from large genomic studies that identify DNA variants, the presence of which is linked to altered risk of having T2D or related traits, such as elevated blood glucose levels. Costanzo’s role on the Portal team is to spread awareness of the resource and also to facilitate its use, by writing clear documentation and by participating in tool and interface development to ensure that the website is user-friendly.

Prior to joining the Broad Institute in 2015, Costanzo was a biocuration scientist with the Saccharomyces, Candida, and Aspergillus Genome Databases at Stanford University. She was also employed by Proteome, Inc. and Incyte Genomics, and performed basic research on the genetics and molecular biology of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s/baker’s yeast) at Cornell University.

Costanzo earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology in the laboratory of Janice Pero at Harvard University, studying transcriptional regulation in the Bacillus subtilis bacteriophage SPO1, and holds a B.A. degree in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Contact Maria Costanzo via email at mariacos@broadinstitute.org.