Zak Kohane

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD

Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital

10 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115

617-432-2144
Zaklab

Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He served as co-author of the Institute of Medicine Report on Precision Medicine that has been the template for national efforts. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales: from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism.

Over the last 30 years, Kohane’s research agenda has been driven by the vision of what biomedical researchers could do to find new cures, provide new diagnoses and deliver the best care available if data could be converted more rapidly to knowledge and knowledge to practice. In so doing, he has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. At the same time, the new insights afforded by ’omic-scale molecular analyses have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.

In 1987, Kohane earned his MD/PhD from Boston University and then completed his post-doctoral work at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he has since worked as a pediatric endocrinologist. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1992, serving as Director of Countway Library from 2005 to 2015 and as Co-Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics during the same period, before it became the Department of Biomedical Informatics in July 2015. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored the widely-used books Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics (2003) and The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond (2023). He is also Editor-in-Chief of NEJM AI.

Kohane is always on the lookout for like-minded “quants” who share the same goals to bring a better future for medicine and biomedical science to the present.

Current Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities
DBMI Research Areas
DBMI Courses
Does Childhood Trauma Moderate Polygenic Risk for Depression? A Meta-analysis of 5765 Subjects From the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.
Authors: Peyrot WJ, Van der Auwera S, Milaneschi Y, Dolan CV, Madden PAF, Sullivan PF, Strohmaier J, Ripke S, Rietschel M, Nivard MG, Mullins N, Montgomery GW, Henders AK, Heat AC, Fisher HL, Dunn EC, Byrne EM, Air TA, Baune BT, Breen G, Levinson DF, Lewis CM, Martin NG, Nelson EN, Boomsma DI, Grabe HJ, Wray NR, Penninx BWJH.
Biol Psychiatry
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Does Childhood Trauma Moderate Polygenic Risk for Depression? A Meta-analysis of 5765 Subjects From the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.
Authors: Peyrot WJ, Van der Auwera S, Milaneschi Y, Dolan CV, Madden PAF, Sullivan PF, Strohmaier J, Ripke S, Rietschel M, Nivard MG, Mullins N, Montgomery GW, Henders AK, Heat AC, Fisher HL, Dunn EC, Byrne EM, Air TA, Baune BT, Breen G, Levinson DF, Lewis CM, Martin NG, Nelson EN, Boomsma DI, Grabe HJ, Wray NR, Penninx BWJH.
Biol Psychiatry
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Automated typing of red blood cell and platelet antigens: a whole-genome sequencing study.
Authors: Lane WJ, Westhoff CM, Gleadall NS, Aguad M, Smeland-Wagman R, Vege S, Simmons DP, Mah HH, Lebo MS, Walter K, Soranzo N, Di Angelantonio E, Danesh J, Roberts DJ, Watkins NA, Ouwehand WH, Butterworth AS, Kaufman RM, Rehm HL, Silberstein LE, Green RC.
Lancet Haematol
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Automated typing of red blood cell and platelet antigens: a whole-genome sequencing study.
Authors: Lane WJ, Westhoff CM, Gleadall NS, Aguad M, Smeland-Wagman R, Vege S, Simmons DP, Mah HH, Lebo MS, Walter K, Soranzo N, Di Angelantonio E, Danesh J, Roberts DJ, Watkins NA, Ouwehand WH, Butterworth AS, Kaufman RM, Rehm HL, Silberstein LE, Green RC.
Lancet Haematol
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Development of an Algorithm to Identify Patients with Physician-Documented Insomnia.
Authors: Kartoun U, Aggarwal R, Beam AL, Pai JK, Chatterjee AK, Fitzgerald TP, Kohane IS, Shaw SY.
Sci Rep
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Biomedical informatics and machine learning for clinical genomics.
Authors: Diao JA, Kohane IS, Manrai AK.
Hum Mol Genet
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Genome-wide association analyses identify 44 risk variants and refine the genetic architecture of major depression.
Authors: Wray NR, Ripke S, Mattheisen M, Trzaskowski M, Byrne EM, Abdellaoui A, Adams MJ, Agerbo E, Air TM, Andlauer TMF, Bacanu SA, Bækvad-Hansen M, Beekman AFT, Bigdeli TB, Binder EB, Blackwood DRH, Bryois J, Buttenschøn HN, Bybjerg-Grauholm J, Cai N, Castelao E, Christensen JH, Clarke TK, Coleman JIR, Colodro-Conde L, Couvy-Duchesne B, Craddock N, Crawford GE, Crowley CA, Dashti HS, Davies G, Deary IJ, Degenhardt F, Derks EM, Direk N, Dolan CV, Dunn EC, Eley TC, Eriksson N, Escott-Price V, Kiadeh FHF, Finucane HK, Forstner AJ, Frank J, Gaspar HA, Gill M, Giusti-Rodríguez P, Goes FS, Gordon SD, Grove J, Hall LS, Hannon E, Hansen CS, Hansen TF, Herms S, Hickie IB, Hoffmann P, Homuth G, Horn C, Hottenga JJ, Hougaard DM, Hu M, Hyde CL, Ising M, Jansen R, Jin F, Jorgenson E, Knowles JA, Kohane IS, Kraft J, Kretzschmar WW, Krogh J, Kutalik Z, Lane JM, Li Y, Li Y, Lind PA, Liu X, Lu L, MacIntyre DJ, MacKinnon DF, Maier RM, Maier W, Marchini J, Mbarek H, McGrath P, McGuffin P, Medland SE, Mehta D, Middeldorp CM, Mihailov E, Milaneschi Y, Milani L, Mill J, Mondimore FM, Montgomery GW, Mostafavi S, Mullins N, Nauck M, Ng B, Nivard MG, Nyholt DR, O'Reilly PF, Oskarsson H, Owen MJ, Painter JN, Pedersen CB, Pedersen MG, Peterson RE, Pettersson E, Peyrot WJ, Pistis G, Posthuma D, Purcell SM, Quiroz JA, Qvist P, Rice JP, Riley BP, Rivera M, Saeed Mirza S, Saxena R, Schoevers R, Schulte EC, Shen L, Shi J, Shyn SI, Sigurdsson E, Sinnamon GBC, Smit JH, Smith DJ, Stefansson H, Steinberg S, Stockmeier CA, Streit F, Strohmaier J, Tansey KE, Teismann H, Teumer A, Thompson W, Thomson PA, Thorgeirsson TE, Tian C, Traylor M, Treutlein J, Trubetskoy V, Uitterlinden AG, Umbricht D, Van der Auwera S, van Hemert AM, Viktorin A, Visscher PM, Wang Y, Webb BT, Weinsheimer SM, Wellmann J, Willemsen G, Witt SH, Wu Y, Xi HS, Yang J, Zhang F, Arolt V, Baune BT, Berger K, Boomsma DI, Cichon S, Dannlowski U, de Geus ECJ, DePaulo JR, Domenici E, Domschke K, Esko T, Grabe HJ, Hamilton SP, Hayward C, Heath AC, Hinds DA, Kendler KS, Kloiber S, Lewis G, Li QS, Lucae S, Madden PFA, Magnusson PK, Martin NG, McIntosh AM, Metspalu A, Mors O, Mortensen PB, Müller-Myhsok B, Nordentoft M, Nöthen MM, O'Donovan MC, Paciga SA, Pedersen NL, Penninx BWJH, Perlis RH, Porteous DJ, Potash JB, Preisig M, Rietschel M, Schaefer C, Schulze TG, Smoller JW, Stefansson K, Tiemeier H, Uher R, Völzke H, Weissman MM, Werge T, Winslow AR, Lewis CM, Levinson DF, Breen G, Børglum AD, Sullivan PF.
Nat Genet
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Biases in electronic health record data due to processes within the healthcare system: retrospective observational study.
Authors: Agniel D, Kohane IS, Weber GM.
BMJ
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Rcupcake: an R package for querying and analyzing biomedical data through the BD2K PIC-SURE RESTful API.
Authors: Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Guedj R, Korodi G, Stedman J, Furlong LI, Patel CJ, Kohane IS, Avillach P.
Bioinformatics
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Systematic Protein Prioritization for Targeted Proteomics Studies through Literature Mining.
Authors: Yu KH, Lee TM, Wang CS, Chen YJ, Ré C, Kou SC, Chiang JH, Kohane IS, Snyder M.
J Proteome Res
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