Current Environment:

Current Members

Alan Beggs, PhD

Director, The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research

Sir Edwin and Lady Manton Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

Asli Aykanat, MD

Research Fellow, Beggs Laboratory

Pamela Barraza-Flores, PhD

Research Fellow, Beggs Laboratory

Casie Genetti, MS, CGC

Project Manager and Genetic Counselor, The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research

Jill Madden, PhD, MSc, CGC

Associate Director and Genetic Counselor, The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research

Behzad Moghadaszadeh, PhD

Instructor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

Jaclyn Prystupa, MS

SELENON-RM Patient Advocate, Beggs Laboratory

Wathone Win, BS

Research Assistant, Beggs Laboratory

Residents

Clara Hildebrandt, MD Clara Hildebrandt, MD
Resident/Pgy4

Clara Hildebrandt, MD is a PGY-4 in the combined Pediatrics-Genetics Residency at Boston Children's Hospital. She is working on a project correlating genotype to phenotype in patients with clinical or molecular diagnosis of nemaline myopathy, as well as working to identify modifiers of disease severity.
 
Divya Jayaraman, MD Divya Jayaraman, MD
Neurology Resident

Divya Jayaraman graduated from Harvard College in 2008 with an undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences. She joined Christopher A. Walsh's lab next door to the Beggs lab in August 2010 as an HST MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School. Her work in the Walsh Lab focused on functional studies of genes that cause microcephaly and culminated in the successful defense of her dissertation, titled "The role of centriole biogenesis in control of brain size", in June 2015. She graduated from the MD-PhD program in May 2017 and went on to pediatrics/child neurology residency at Boston Children's Hospital. Having taken care of several children with neuromuscular disease in her primary care clinic whom she referred to subspecialty neurology and neuromuscular clinics, she has become interested in neuromuscular diseases both as a clinical specialty and as a research area where there is both significant need and tremendous ongoing excitement about identifying disease genes, understanding disease mechanisms and designing therapeutics including gene therapies. She joined the Beggs lab part-time in spring of 2020 and is writing an R25 research proposal to fund research toward the last 6 months of residency (with an option to extend by a year), during which she plans to study the role of selenoproteins in neuromuscular disease, as well as genomic sequence data analysis of patients with potentially undiagnosed neuromuscular disease to discover new disease genes.

Co-op Student

Pam Lin Pam Lin

Pam Lin is a fifth-year biology major at Northeastern University and is currently doing an internship with the Beggs’ team. She helps enroll patients and families into clinical studies and acts as a helping hand to the research assistants and genetic counselors.

Beggs Laboratory Affiliates

Jeffrey Widrick

Beggs Laboratory Collaborators

Vandana A. Gupta, PhD Vandana A. Gupta, PhD
Assistant Professor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School

 
Michael W. Lawlor, MD Michael W. Lawlor, MD
Assistant professor, Medical College of Wisconsin

 
Josine de Winter, PhD Josine de Winter, PhD
Research Fellow