As the primary goal of our lab is to come up with innovative solutions to hard problems, we are interested in scientists with a wide range of backgrounds and training.
Due to the current political situation in the US, hiring is currently frozen Harvard-wide.
Ph.D. students must be enrolled in a Harvard graduate program such as Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG), Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology (SSQBio), Biophysics, or certain MIT graduate programs. If you are an enrolled graduate student considering a rotation, please email Michael with an explanation of your goals and your interest in the lab.
Unfortunately, we cannot admit external Ph.D. students directly to the lab. If you are not currently a graduate student at Harvard, consider applying to any of the HILS graduate programs.
We are are interested in both computationally- and experimentally-focused postdocs, though all postdocs should expect to do both. If you are interested in working with us, please email Michael with your CV, at least one paper you've written, and a brief description of your background and your goals in pursuing a postdoc. Applicants who do not include this information may not receive a reply.
Unfortunately, at the moment we are not equipped to host interns or other short-term visitors.
Further, we only take external summer undergraduates through organized training programs such as the DBMI Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics or the Systems Biology Summer Internship Program.
Term-time research for Harvard undergraduates is restricted to those who have had full-time experience in our lab.
We do not currently take high school students in any capacity, either in person (BL2 laboratory) or remotely.
If you don't fall into any of the above categories, but still think the lab might be a good fit for you, please email Michael explaining.
My aim in running the lab is to foster an environment of creativity, curiosity, and intellectual honesty. I see the role of trainees in this lab as collaborators. If you join, I don't expect you to work on one of my projects per se, but rather to lead your own project that's interesting to both of us. To paraphrase Florian Markowetz: you don't work for me, I work with you. I do expect you to collaborate generously, sharing your skills and time with your labmates so that we can learn from one another. I also expect you to push yourself to learn new skills, make mistakes, and importantly, to foster an environment in which others are best able to do the same. My job is to help you achieve your professional goals through doing the best research you can. You might not end up doing a 50-50 mix of computation and experiment, but you should expect to do at least a little of each.