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
Associate Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
10 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115

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
Healthcare spending and utilization for pediatric Irritable Bowel Syndrome in a commercially insured population.
Authors: Beinvogl B, Palmer N, Kohane I, Nurko S.
Neurogastroenterol Motil
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Multinational characterization of neurological phenotypes in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
Authors: Le TT, Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Son J, Hong C, South AM, Beaulieu-Jones BK, Loh NHW, Luo Y, Morris M, Ngiam KY, Patel LP, Samayamuthu MJ, Schriver E, Tan ALM, Moore J, Cai T, Omenn GS, Avillach P, Kohane IS, Visweswaran S, Mowery DL, Xia Z.
Sci Rep
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International Changes in COVID-19 Clinical Trajectories Across 315 Hospitals and 6 Countries: Retrospective Cohort Study.
Authors: Weber GM, Zhang HG, L'Yi S, Bonzel CL, Hong C, Avillach P, Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Palmer NP, Tan ALM, Wang X, Yuan W, Gehlenborg N, Alloni A, Amendola DF, Bellasi A, Bellazzi R, Beraghi M, Bucalo M, Chiovato L, Cho K, Dagliati A, Estiri H, Follett RW, García Barrio N, Hanauer DA, Henderson DW, Ho YL, Holmes JH, Hutch MR, Kavuluru R, Kirchoff K, Klann JG, Krishnamurthy AK, Le TT, Liu M, Loh NHW, Lozano-Zahonero S, Luo Y, Maidlow S, Makoudjou A, Malovini A, Martins MR, Moal B, Morris M, Mowery DL, Murphy SN, Neuraz A, Ngiam KY, Okoshi MP, Omenn GS, Patel LP, Pedrera Jiménez M, Prudente RA, Samayamuthu MJ, Sanz Vidorreta FJ, Schriver ER, Schubert P, Serrano Balazote P, Tan BW, Tanni SE, Tibollo V, Visweswaran S, Wagholikar KB, Xia Z, Zöller D, Kohane IS, Cai T, South AM, Brat GA.
J Med Internet Res
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ATLAS: an automated association test using probabilistically linked health records with application to genetic studies.
Authors: Zhang HG, Hejblum BP, Weber GM, Palmer NP, Churchill SE, Szolovits P, Murphy SN, Liao KP, Kohane IS, Cai T.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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Effectiveness of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in pregnancy.
Authors: Dagan N, Barda N, Biron-Shental T, Makov-Assif M, Key C, Kohane IS, Hernán MA, Lipsitch M, Hernandez-Diaz S, Reis BY, Balicer RD.
Nat Med
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Patient-led data sharing for clinical bioinformatics research: USCDI and beyond.
Authors: Gordon WJ, Gottlieb D, Kreda D, Mandel JC, Mandl KD, Kohane IS.
J Am Med Inform Assoc
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Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting.
Authors: Barda N, Dagan N, Ben-Shlomo Y, Kepten E, Waxman J, Ohana R, Hernán MA, Lipsitch M, Kohane I, Netzer D, Reis BY, Balicer RD.
N Engl J Med
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Real-world data analyses unveiled the immune-related adverse effects of immune checkpoint inhibitors across cancer types.
Authors: Wang F, Yang S, Palmer N, Fox K, Kohane IS, Liao KP, Yu KH, Kou SC.
NPJ Precis Oncol
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Fecal microbiota transplantation and Clostridioides difficile infection among privately insured patients in the United States.
Authors: El Halabi J, Palmer N, Fox K, Kohane I, Farhat MR.
J Gastroenterol
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Medication Use in the Management of Comorbidities Among Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder From a Large Nationwide Insurance Database.
Authors: Feroe AG, Uppal N, Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Mousavi S, Greenspun P, Surati R, Kohane IS, Avillach P.
JAMA Pediatr
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