Claire Churchhouse, D.Phil.

Claire Churchhouse is the scientific advisor to Ben Neale at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is an institute scientist. She plays a vital role in driving the group's scientific program of devising and deploying scalable analytic approaches to uncover and understand the genetic risk factors of severe psychiatric disorders. She brings scientific and strategic direction to a wide portfolio of projects that includes sequencing-driven studies of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and the systematic investigation of large-scale biobanks to better understand the role of genetic variation in common disease more broadly. A member of the leadership team of the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at MGH, Churchhouse works alongside principal investigators to develop the scientific direction of the unit, identify areas for potential collaboration and opportunity, and manage operations across the program.
 
She holds a key leadership role as director of strategy and operations for the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA) which aims to improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of common diseases by accelerating discovery from genetic maps to insights into biological mechanisms, disease etiology, and, ultimately, medicine. She guides the executive committee in strategic decision making and priority setting, and liaises with researchers and potential stakeholders to understand their needs and challenges in advancing towards ICDA’s goals.
 
Churchhouse joined the Broad as a postdoc in 2012, developing methodological approaches to understand the connection between the metabolome, type 2 diabetes, and its associated genetic risk factors. She then became the first scientific advisor at Broad, helping to conceive of and establish the role within the institution.
 
Churchhouse earned a B.Sc. from McGill University and a D.Phil. in statistics from the University of Oxford.