Harrison Brand

Education

• PhD University of Pittsburgh 2013

Research Interests

• autism spectrum disorder; cleft lip; cleft palate; complex diseases; congenital abnormalities; congenital diaphragmatic hernia; diagnostics; genetic variation

Research Narrative

Harrison Brand is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) with a research focus on the computational analyses of large-scale genomics datasets in developmental disorders. After receiving his PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Pittsburgh, he accepted a postdoc in the lab of Dr Michael Talkowski at the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine where he focused on developing novel methods for the detection of structural variation (SV) in whole genome sequencing. These methods have been incorporated into the popular GATK variant calling pipeline and applied to a variety of disease and population reference cohorts including the genome aggregation database (gnomAD). Upon completion of his postdoc he started his own lab at MGH where he is actively exploring the genetic causes of structural birth defects and neurodevelopmental disorders.