Broad Institute Fellow Hilary Finucane PhD ’17 received the Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health. The award recognizes “exceptional junior scientists” with an opportunity to skip traditional postdoctoral training and move immediately into independent research positions. Her award was one of 86 grants given to scientists as part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research (HRHR) program. Hilary develops computational methods for analyzing biological data. She plans to develop methods to analyze large-scale genomic data to identify disease-relevant cell types and tissues, a necessary first step for understanding molecular mechanisms of disease. In June 2017, she completed her PhD in applied math; her research was in statistical genetics, and she was advised by Alkes Price.
Hilary also recently contributed to “Association analysis identifies 65 new breast cancer risk loci” in Advance Online Publication (AOP) on www.nature.com.