Steven E. Hyman, Broad Institute

Steven E. Hyman is director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a core member of the Broad, and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

From 2001 to 2011, Hyman served as provost of Harvard University, the university’s chief academic officer. As provost, he had a special focus on establishment of collaborative initiatives in the sciences and engineering spanning multiple disciplines and institutions. From 1996 to 2001, he served as director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he emphasized investment in neuroscience and emerging genetic technologies and initiated a series of large practical clinical trials that were forerunners of comparative efficacy studies.

Hyman is president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2018), past president of the Society for Neuroscience (2015), and founding president of the International Neuroethics Society (2008-2014), and he previously served as editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience (2002-2016). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine where he serves on the council. He chairs the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), which brings together industry, government, academia, patient groups, and foundations, and he serves on the governing board of the National Research Council, the operating arm of NASEM. Hyman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. In 2016, he was awarded the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health by the National Academy of Medicine.

Hyman received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale College, an M.A. from the University of Cambridge, which he attended as a Mellon fellow studying history and philosophy of science, and an M.D. cum laude from Harvard Medical School.

Guoping Feng, McGovern Institute for Brain Research

Dr. Guoping Feng is the Poitras Chair Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the Director of Model Systems and Neurobiology at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. Dr. Feng’s research is devoted to understanding the mechanisms regulating the development and function of synapses in the brain and how synaptic dysfunction may contribute to brain disorders. Using genetically engineered animal models, Dr. Feng’s laboratory combines cutting-edge technologies and multidisciplinary approaches to unravel the neurobiological mechanisms of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.

Benjamin Neale, Broad Institute

Benjamin Neale is co-director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute and is Director of Genetics at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is an associate professor in the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit (ATGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he directs the Genomics of Public Health Initiative. He is also an associate professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Neale is strongly committed to gaining insights into the genetics of common, complex human diseases. Neale’s research focused heavily on the development and application of statistical methods for the analysis of large-scale genomics datasets. He has an extensive track record in consortium science, including service as chair of the Brainstorm Consortium, chair of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium ADHD group and analysis chair of the Whole Genome Sequencing of Psychiatric Disorders. He has also coordinated large-scale data generation activities including the PsychChip genotyping project (>120,000 samples genotyped), the schizophrenia Exome meta-analysis consortium (>25,000 cases sequenced) the Epi25K effort (>20,000 cases sequenced).

Neale is deeply committed to advancing psychiatric genetics as an active member of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) steering committee and analysis committee. He has served as a statistical advisor to analysts in other PGC working groups including addictions, autism, cross-disorder, TS/OCD and schizophrenia groups. These efforts underscore his commitment to understanding the genetic influences on psychiatric illness and how to translate those into insights into the biological basis of these diseases. He is currently co-chair the International Common Disease Alliance Maps Workgroup and have worked with many different international consortia, including the International Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics Consortium, GiANT and the Global Lipids Genomics Consortium.

The Neale lab has developed and disseminated some of the most widely used statistical approaches in genomics including LD Score regression enabling widespread evaluation of genetic correlation across complex traits. More recently, the Neale lab is developing Hail, a cloud-native software platform for scaling up genetic analyses, which we used to generate and QC the latest version of the gnomAD callset as well as conduct GWAS on ~10,000 traits in the UK Biobank sample which we released freely and publicly.

Neale studied at the University of Chicago and Virginia Commonwealth University, earning a B.Sc. in genetics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in human genetics from King’s College in London, UK. Neale completed his postdoctoral training in Daly’s laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition to many local research collaborations, he also serves as advisor and analyst to international genetic research consortia on psychiatric diseases.