Margaux Hujoel (she/her) is a natural problem solver. As a child growing up in Seattle, she’d pore over a book filled with math problems and concepts from the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, and other cultures. Today, as a postdoctoral researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she grapples with problems of a different kind: the complex connections between our genetics and our health.
She first latched onto genetics as a graduate student in biostatistics at Harvard. That’s where she discovered how statistical tools could help her make sense of the growing deluge of genomic data. She has used computational approaches to gain new insight into the genetics of Alzheimer’s by deciphering family history data from large biobanks, and Hujoel is now working on more efficiently detecting large-scale DNA changes that could reveal new risk factors for disease.
“I really learn every day, whether it be something about a disease or about genetics or about computation and the best way to efficiently run something,” she said. “All of it I find to be fascinating, so it keeps me on my toes.”
When she’s not in the lab, Hujoel is often either knitting or trying out a new recipe from one of the many cookbooks she amasses (she once wanted to be a chef). Her path into science was supported by many mentors, including faculty at her undergraduate institution, Harvey Mudd, where she saw how intricate and engrossing research could be. After finishing her postdoc, she hopes to start her own lab to spark that same curiosity in others.
“Our bodies are kind of crazy. The amount of differences in tissues can be shocking,” Hujoel said. “It’s fascinating.”
— Jonathan Wosen
