Medical and Population Genetics Research

Medical and Population Genetics focuses on understanding how genomic variation contributes to human variation in visible traits, susceptibility to disease, and response to therapy. At the Broad Institute, these efforts involve many teams and labs, but center around the Program in Medical and Population Genetics.

The Program in Medical and Population Genetics is a diverse community of experts from a variety of fields — population genetics, statistics, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics — who collaborate to characterize genetic variants and establish their role in disease. The program is a vibrant hub for scientific groups to share ideas and launch collaborative projects. Techniques and methods developed for the study of one disease are then shared and applied to other disease research areas.

Every Thursday morning, program members gather for a lively and highly interactive meeting, featuring talks by scientists within the program or visiting speakers from other institutions. These are often preceded by the Primer series, which introduces program members to a variety of topics in the field.

Members of the program work closely with scientists in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, the Metabolism Program, the Genomics Platform, and the Data Sciences Platform, in addition to many other labs in the Harvard-MIT community and elsewhere.