Student

Corrine Smolen

Graduate Student

Adviser: Santhosh Girirajan

Email ces6136@psu.edu

Bioinformatics and Genomics IGDP

Researchers have developed a new framework to study the functional impact of genetic background on the expression and severity of neurodevelopmental features associated with a deletion of a portion of chromosome 16. The research team used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived from patients with the deletion, their families and a healthy donor that they differentiated into different types of neuronal cells — image shows immunostained iPSC-derived neurons on the left and iPSC-derived neural progenitor cells on the right — to study how interactions among a patient’s entire genetic architecture and the deletion help determine the features that the individual will manifest. Credit: Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

May 05, 2026

How can the same genetic mutation lead to different clinical outcomes?

New research helps explain why disease-associated genetic variants can lead to variable clinical outcomes, influenced both by the patterns of secondary variants, or genetic background, and by how cohorts of individuals in a study are ascertained. In a family, shown on left, secondary variants can influence the severity of clinical outcomes, which is indicated by intensity of blue shading, or which features are present between a parent and a child that both carry the primary variant. However, this relationship between secondary and primary variants is different if the primary variant was discovered in a biobank that includes mostly healthy individuals, in the middle, or people identified for a shared clinical feature, on right. Credit: Corrine Smolen/Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

October 07, 2025

Background genetic variants influence clinical features in complex disorders

February 07, 2024

Parental Traits May Influence Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, and the genes that can lead to them, vary in a population. This is illustrated in the figure on the left, with brighter red colors represent more severe symptoms, asterisks represent individuals with genetic variants that convey high risk for developing such disorders. A new study that looked at 97,000 families observed assortative mating for these traits with good correlation between the traits in the parents, as illustrated in the middle figure. The researchers showed that evaluating both parents for these traits, in addition to the high-risk genetic variants, improved their ability to predict the prevalence and, potentially, severity of the disorders in children, illustrated on the right. Credit: Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

February 07, 2024

Predicting neurodevelopmental disease in children from parent’s traits

A photo of (L-R) Jessica Walnut, Alenka Hafer (front), Troy Ott (rear), Corrine Smolen, and Avery Sicher

July 26, 2023

HGSAC looks to raise the bar with election of new co-chairs

People at a TaMIS meeting, seated around a table

November 30, 2022

Huck Grad Students Work Towards Inclusion

HGSAC student leaders

September 14, 2022

Huck graduate students elect co-chairs for new academic year

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