White House Author

Endocrinologist and human geneticist David Altshuler is one of four founding members of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and serves as the Institute’s Deputy Director and Chief Academic Officer. He is professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, and adjunct professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David studies human genetic variation and its application to disease, using tools and information from the Human Genome Project. He has been a lead investigator in The SNP Consortium, the International HapMap Project, and the 1,000 Genomes Project - public-private partnerships that have created public maps of human genome sequence variation as a foundation for disease research. His work has contributed to the identification of gene variants that are associated with the risk of common conditions, including type 2 diabetes, blood cholesterol and myocardial infarction. He is a member of the US Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics and of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. David was awarded the Curt Stern Award of the American Society of Human Genetics and the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the American Diabetes Association.