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

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
The ever imminent electronic medical record.
Authors: Kohane IS.
J Med Pract Manage
View full abstract on Pubmed
Comparing the similarity of time-series gene expression using signal processing metrics.
Authors: Butte AJ, Bao L, Reis BY, Watkins TW, Kohane IS.
J Biomed Inform
View full abstract on Pubmed
Corticotropin releasing hormone increases apparent potency of adrenocorticotropic hormone stimulation of cortisol secretion.
Authors: Gonzalez-Heydrich J, Steingard RJ, Putnam FW, De Bellis MD, Beardslee W, Kohane IS.
Med Hypotheses
View full abstract on Pubmed
The personal internetworked notary and guardian.
Authors: Riva A, Mandl KD, Oh DH, Nigrin DJ, Butte A, Szolovits P, Kohane IS.
Int J Med Inform
View full abstract on Pubmed
Public standards and patients' control: how to keep electronic medical records accessible but private.
Authors: Mandl KD, Szolovits P, Kohane IS.
BMJ
View full abstract on Pubmed
Extracting knowledge from dynamics in gene expression.
Authors: Reis BY, Butte AS, Kohane IS.
J Biomed Inform
View full abstract on Pubmed
Optimal data entry by patients: effects of interface structure and design.
Authors: Porter SC, Kohane IS.
Stud Health Technol Inform
View full abstract on Pubmed
Unsupervised learning from complex data: the matrix incision tree algorithm.
Authors: Kim JH, Ohno-Machado L, Kohane IS.
Pac Symp Biocomput
View full abstract on Pubmed
Determining significant fold differences in gene expression analysis.
Authors: Butte AJ, Ye J, Häring HU, Stumvoll M, White MF, Kohane IS.
Pac Symp Biocomput
View full abstract on Pubmed
On reporting fold differences.
Authors: Tsien CL, Libermann TA, Gu X, Kohane IS.
Pac Symp Biocomput
View full abstract on Pubmed