Hailiang Huang, PhD
hhuang@broadinstitute.org
Assistant Investigator, Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Associate Member
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Hailiang’s research focuses on the genetics of complex disorders, especially autoimmune and psychiatric disorders. He is interested in developing new statistical and analytical methods, and use them to pinpoint and understand the genetic factors driving human complex disorders. His studies usually use large-scale omics data from various consortia and public available sources such as UK Biobank, NIH Roadmap, and GTEx.
Hailiang developed GWiS, a gene-based association test that has been used in many consortia to find genes associated with human complex disorders (Huang et al., PLoS Genetics, 2011). He is a member of the International Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Genetics Consortium (IIBDGC) and has co-led its recent fine-mapping effort to resolve known genetic associations to variants with high causal probabilities (Huang et al., Nature, 2017). He is also leading a workgroup in the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) to build a large-scale Asian schizophrenia cohort and use this cohort to understand the genetic architecture of schizophrenia in the Asian populations. Hailiang’s other research interests include developing methods for testing rare variants with population stratification, investigating the connection between tissue-specific gene regulation and non-coding genetic associations, and understanding the genetic mechanisms underlying the spontaneous clearance of the hepatitis C virus.
Hailiang received cross-disciplinary training combining engineering, genetics and medicine. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, supervised by Dr. Joel Bader. He completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Mark Daly at MGH and the Broad Institute.
Research Fellows
Associate Computational Biologist
Visiting Graduate Students
Project Managers
| Name | Role in the lab | Where are they now? |
|---|---|---|
| Lili Guan | Visiting Fellow | Associate Professor, Peking University Sixth Hospital (Institute of Mental Health) |
| Robert Law | Research Fellow | Research Fellow, Brigham and Women's Hospital |
| Baijia Li | Graduate Student | Graduate Student, The First Affiliated Hospital -Xi'an Jiaotong University |
| Sha Liu | Visiting Fellow | Associate Professor, Shanxi Medical University |
| Ryan Longchamps | Research Fellow | Scientist, Deep Genomics Inc. |
| Yunfeng Ruan | Research Fellow | Postdoctoral Associate with Dr. Amit Khera at the Broad Institute |
| Wenyu Song | Research Fellow | Instructor, Brigham And Women's Hospital |
| Meiling Thompson | Undergraduate Student | Undergraduate student, Harvard University |
| Feng Zhu | Visiting Fellow | Professor, The First Affiliated Hospital -Xi'an Jiaotong University |
