The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard lays off 87 employees
In an Oct 10 email to members of the Broad Institute community, Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced the layoff of 87 employees, 75 of whom were part of the Data Sciences Platform and IT departments.
The layoffs coincide with the end of a partnership with Microsoft that resulted in Terra, a computational platform for researchers to access data and conduct biomedical analyses. Terra was built by the Data Science Platform team through a partnership with Microsoft and Verily (formerly known as Google Life Sciences) which began in 2021.
“The rapid pace of technological and scientific change requires us to retool to stay ahead of the field,” Golub wrote. The Broad is home to almost 3,000 employees and affiliated personnel; the Data Science Platform department is made up of around 300 software engineers and computational biologists.
“We’re doing everything we can to help smooth the transition for all the Broadies affected,” Golub wrote.
Earlier in May, Stacey Gabriel, Executive Vice President of Platforms and Scientific Execution at the Broad, announced the elimination of 16 roles in CDoT (the Center for the Development of Therapeutics), as part of an “organizational restructuring to prepare CDoT to become more flexible and resilient to ongoing shifts in the ecosystem.”