Robinson Lab Announcements
Welcome to the Robinson Lab announcements page. Please scroll down to read the latest news and projects that are taking place in the lab.
March 2023
Congratulations to Ajay Nadig for receiving his F31!
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And congratulations to Susan Kuo for receiving The Autism Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship which is helping us translate our science into clinical recommendations. In collaboration with Somer Bishop, Stephan Sanders, and Audrey Thurm, we are using early developmental phenotypes and incorporating them into a clinical genetic prediction model. We hope that pediatricians and parents/caregivers can input easily accessible information about an autistic child’s early development — like age at walking — in a website. The website can then provide information about the probabilities that the child might carry a rare de novo variant associated with neurodevelopmental conditions. The Autism Science Foundation is recruiting clinicians and families to help provide feedback on this resource, so we can make it as useful and user-friendly as possible. We've learned so much from discussing this resource with autistic folks and clinicians and are looking forward to sharing this tool soon with the autistic community!
August 2022
Congratulations to Robinson Lab's Daniel Weiner who compelted his dissertation defense, "Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics".
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Dan is a MD/PhD student at Harvard Medical School with interests in the genetic architecture of common disease and cellular and molecular convergence of genetic variation in neuropsychiatric disease. He is co-mentored by Dr. Elise Robinson and Dr. Luke O’Connor. Previously, he graduated from Yale with a degree in cognitive science.
July 2022
Congratulations to Susan Kuo and her paper in JAMA peds (Developmental Variability in Autism Across 17 000 Autistic Individuals and 4000 Siblings Without an Autism Diagnosis
Comparisons by Cohort, Intellectual Disability, Genetic Etiology, and Age at Diagnosis)
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Along with her paper Susan was also awarded the ASF postdoc fellowship.
July 2022
Congratulations to both Celia van der Merwe and Alice Galvin on their promotions!
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Celia is now the founding director of the Neurodevelopmental Variability Initiative (NDV, formerly NDD) at Broad. She will be building and defining the NDV community, identifying collaborative opportunities, fundraising, and developing scientific initiatives. Alice is now the project lead for NeuroDev, and is responsible for NeuroDev operations. The Robinson Lab is lucky to have you both.
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Lastly, congratulations to Robbee Wedow for his next position at Purdue University.
April 2022
We are excited to announce a new lab member to our group, Jing Zhang. Jing was a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Group of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (GGEB) at the University of Pennsylvania and joins us as a postdoctoral fellow. Jing is interested in integrating contributions of common and rare genetic variation to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and quantitative autistic traits in family-based studies to parse heterogeneity in ASD. Welcome to the lab Jing!
June 2022
Congratulations to Emilie Wigdor and Dan Weiner for publishing their paper The female protective effect against autism spectrum disorder.
June 2022
Congratulations to Dan Weiner and Ajay Nadig on receiving the WCPG ECIP travel award!
Dan will also be presenting his upcoming defense in August of this year.