Melina Claussnitzer, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

  • Weissman Davis and Titlebaum Family M​GH Research Scholar​, Class 2024-2029 

  • Faculty, Center for Genomic Medicine & Endocrine Division, Massachusetts General Hospital

  • Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

  • Director, Broad Diabetes Initiative

  • Associate Director of Scientific Strategy, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Dr. Claussnitzer is a recognized international leader in metabolic disease genetics, contributing to the broader scientific community as a member of the Steering Committee of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Program in Common Metabolic Diseases, founding member and co-lead of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA), and Member and prior Co-Chair of the Atlas of Variant Effects (AVE) Working Group on Experimental Technology and Standards.

Dr. Claussnitzer trained in nutritional medicine, genetics, and math. Her PhD was at the Technical University of Munich on ‘Translating non-coding genetic variation to effector genes in the context of type 2 diabetes’, and postdoctoral fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. Her postdoc was short, only one year, at which point she simultaneously received a faculty position at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct faculty position at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT, as well as the call from the Broad Institute to launch her lab in 2014. She has coined the term Variant-to-Function (V2F), and is a recognized international leader in metabolic disease genetics and genomics, contributing to the broader scientific community as a member of the Steering Committee of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Program in Common Metabolic Diseases, founding member and co-lead of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA), prior Co-Chair of the Atlas of Variant Effects (AVE) alliance, and board member of the Leena Peltonen School of Human Genomics. She has received a series of national and international prestigious awards such as the Massachusetts General Hospital Research Scholar Class 2024 distinction, the Broad/Harvard/MIT Next Generation award, and the Science Award in Diabetes Research of the German Diabetes Foundation. She serves on the SAB of multiple companies and start-ups.

Dr. Claussnitzer’s thesis work focused on the computational and experimental foundations of genome-wide association study (GWAS) locus dissection and its application to the conversion of type 2 diabetes risk loci into disease mechanisms. She pioneered new computational and experimental methods for converting genomic regions associated with complex diseases and traits in humans into functions using multiple species comparisons and large-scale epigenomic and transcriptomic data sets, as well as CRISPR-Cas9 mediated variant editing. Her lab applies those methods to mechanistically dissect metabolic risk loci across diverse phenotypic scales.

Dr. Claussnitzer earned her “Vordiplom” (equivalent of B.Sc.) in mathematics and nutritional sciences and her “Diplom” (equivalent of M.Sc.) in molecular biology and nutritional sciences from the University of Hohenheim, Germany, where she now holds a faculty position. She earned her Ph.D. in genetics of complex diseases from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.