Update on Computational Approaches to Autism Research

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. 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. Kohane’s i2b2 project is currently deployed internationally to over 120 major academic health centers to drive discovery research in disease and pharmacovigilance (including providing evidence on drugs which ultimately contributed to “black box”ing by the FDA). Dr. Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored a widely used book on Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.