Morton Lab

The Morton Lab aims to advancing our understanding of the neonatal health and disease with the goal of improving diagnosis and personalized care through gene discovery, functional analysis of patient variants, and identifying biomarkers of neonatal outcomes. Specifically, we focus on the genetics of congenital heart disease, and early influence on neurodevelopment.

Combining the perspectives of developmental biology, human genetics, and neonatology, our group is focused on understanding mechanisms of neonatal disease to improve diagnoses and enable new therapeutics. We aim to be interdisciplinary to gain new perspectives on science, so our work is very collaborative including ongoing projects with colleagues in the Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center, the Department of Cardiology, and the National Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium.

About Sarah Morton, PhD
Sarah Morton, MD, PhD studied Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Michigan before obtaining her MD/PhD at the University of California, San Francisco. During her PhD in developmental biology, she studied microRNA regulation of heart development in the laboratory of Dr. Deepak Srivastava. After medical school she competed pediatrics residency at the Boston Combined Residency Program followed by neonatology fellowship in the Harvard Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship Training Program. After her clinical training, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Christine and Jonathan Seidman at the Department of Genetics, where she trained in computational biology and human genetics.

In addition to research, Sarah co-chairs the NICU Nutrition Committee and is co-director of the Newborn Medicine Summer Student Research Program. Sarah also helps to organize the weekly Broad Medical and Population Group Primer series, which can be accessed here.