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Samantha Laber

NOVO NORDISK POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW (2017-2020)

  • Project: Determining potential causal mechanisms by genetic fine mapping, genomic annotation and functional characterization at obesity and fat distribution loci.

Biography

Samantha was awarded a Novo Nordisk Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2017 working with Professor Cecilia Lindgren's team at the Big Data Institute (BDI), Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery at the University of Oxford and also collaborated with Melina Claussnitzer's group at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. She holds a PhD from the Department for Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford and worked in the lab of Prof Roger Cox to decipher the function of the FTO obesity risk locus

During her Novo Nordisk fellowship, Samantha developed a high content imaging approach for lipid-accumulating cell types (LipocyteProfiler) with the aim to decipher underlying mechanisms of genetic and polygenic risk of common complex diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity-related traits. During her fellowship she combined experimental and computational analyses to systematically dissect human genetic risk variants in metabolic diseases by transcriptionally and morphologically profiling human-derived primary pre-adipocytes. Samantha has since joined Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, Boston, with the goal to use her knowledge to uncover new biology to generate new medicines.