Samantha Laber

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. Her research areas of interest are primarily the genetics of complex diseases and during her fellowship she combined experimental and computational analyses to systematically dissect human genetic risk variants in metabolic diseases. The aim of her work is to use and develop novel approaches in order to dissect the mechanisms behind non-coding genomic variation in disease risk.

From 2020, Samantha has taken on a Research Scientist II position at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as part of a Bayer/Broad Alliance in Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases where she is leading a project that aims to deciphering the function of common disease variants in cardiometablic diseases, with the goal to identify new potential drug targets.

Evaluating the cardiovascular safety of sclerostin inhibition using evidence from meta-analysis of clinical trials and human genetics. Bovijn J et al, (2020) Sci Transl Med

GWAS identifies novel risk locus for erectile dysfunction and implicates hypothalamic neurobiology and diabetes in etiology. Bovijn J et al, (2019), Am J Hum Genet

GWAS meta-analysis highlights the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis (HPG axis) in the genetic regulation of menstrual cycle length. Laisk t et al, (2018), Human Mol Genet