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Home > About > Leadership > Elizabeth Karlson

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Elizabeth Karlson, MD

“Personalized medicine is collecting information on modifiable lifestyle, behavioral and environmental risk factors for chronic diseases, and combining these factors with genetic factors and biomarkers in profiles that can be communicated to individuals to educate them about their risk. This information allows patients and their physicians to tailor risk management, to encourage patients to modify their behavior and to help them choose preventive therapies based on their individual risk profile.”

Dr. Karlson is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Scientific Director, Mass General Brigham Personalized Medicine, Principal Investigator of the Mass General Brigham Biobank, All of Us Research Program, eMERGE Clinical Center at Mass General Brigham, and Post-Acute Sequela of SARS-CoV2, Data Resource Core. She serves as director of Rheumatic Disease Epidemiology in the Section of Clinical Sciences, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Biography

Dr. Elizabeth Karlson is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Scientific Director of Mass General Brigham Personalized Medicine, and a rheumatologist and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Karlson obtained her M.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She completed her medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, followed by a clinical and research rheumatology fellowship, also at the Brigham. She joined the Brigham Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation and Immunity in 1994. Dr. Karlson has played leadership roles in numerous multi-institutional research projects.

As PI of the Mass General Brigham Biobank, Dr. Karlson has helped lead all aspects of this enterprise-wide effort. She leads the eMERGE (electronic Medical Records and Genomics Consortium) Clinical Center at Mass General Brigham studying the implementation of polygenic risk scores for common diseases in clinical care. She co-leads recruitment of a diverse cohort of >25,000 New England participants as co-Principal Investigator of the All of Us Research Program. She is co-Principal Investigator of the newly awarded Post-Acute Sequela of SARS-CoV2 Data Resource Core (PASC-DRC). She serves as Director of the Rheumatic Disease Epidemiology Research Program for the Section of Clinical Sciences, Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation, and Immunity, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Karlson has conducted patient-oriented and translational research for 28 years with expertise in longitudinal cohort studies, disease epidemiology and genetics, biobanking, and the use of bioinformatics to define phenotypes in the EHR.

She is the author or co-author of 282 publications. She has led large scale recruitment and use of data and samples for the Mass General Brigham Biobank that collects samples, family history, lifestyle and environmental survey data linked with comprehensive health information from electronic health records from 130,000+ Mass General Brigham patients. She coordinates bioinformatics analyses for phenotype algorithms for the Biobank Portal and eMERGE network. She has served on grant review committees for the National Institutes of Health, Arthritis Foundation, and national grant agencies in Canada and Europe. She has served on the American College of Rheumatology Blue Ribbon Panel on Academic Rheumatology. As a dedicated mentor, Dr. Karlson has supervised and mentored 25 trainees, of whom 20 hold appointments at academic institutions, 6 have received NIH K awards, 14 have received career development awards, and 6 have received NIH R01 grants. She has received the Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award, the Excellence in Investigative Mentoring Award from the American College of Rheumatology, and the Senior Faculty Mentoring Award from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Education

  • 1984, BA (magna cum laude), Biology, Brown University
  • 1988, MD, Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
  • 1991, Clinical Effectiveness Program: Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Decision Analysis, Health Policy, Harvard School of Public Health

Publications

  • Hiraki LT, Munger KL, Costenbader KH, Karlson EW. Dietary intake of vitamin D during adolescence and risk of adult-onset systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2012 Dec;64(12):1829-36. doi: 10.1002/acr.21776. PubMed PMID: 22744978; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3488139.
  • Canhão H, Rodrigues AM, Mourão AF, Martins F, Santos MJ, Canas-Silva J, Polido-Pereira J, Pereira Silva JA, Costa JA, Araújo D, Silva C, Santos H, Duarte C, da Silva JA, Pimentel-Santos FM, Branco JC, Karlson EW, Fonseca JE, Solomon DH. Comparative effectiveness and predictors of response to tumour necrosis factor inhibitor therapies in rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2012 Nov;51(11):2020-6. doi: 10.1093/rheumatology/kes184. Epub 2012 Jul 28. PubMed PMID: 22843791; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3475979.
  • Lin C, Canhao H, Miller T, et al. Feature engineering and selection for rheumatoid arthritis disease activity classification using electronic medical records. In: ICML Workshop on Machine Learning from Clinical Data 2012; Edinburgh; 2012.
  • Arkema EV, Hart JE, Bertrand KA, Laden F, Grodstein F, Rosner BA, Karlson EW, Costenbader KH. Exposure to ultraviolet-B and risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis among women in the Nurses' Health Study. Ann Rheum Dis. 2013 Apr;72(4):506-11. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2012-202302. Epub 2013 Feb 4. PubMed PMID: 23380431; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3678095.
  • Hart JE, Källberg H, Laden F, Costenbader KH, Yanosky JD, Klareskog L, Alfredsson L, Karlson EW. Ambient air pollution exposures and risk of rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2013 Jul;65(7):1190-6. doi:10.1002/acr.21975. PubMed PMID: 23401426; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3659202.
  • Hart JE, Källberg H, Laden F, Bellander T, Costenbader KH, Holmqvist M, Klareskog L, Alfredsson L, Karlson EW. Ambient air pollution exposures and risk of rheumatoid arthritis: results from the Swedish EIRA case-control study. Ann Rheum Dis. 2013 Jun;72(6):888-94. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2012-201587. Epub 2012 Jul 24. PubMed PMID: 22833374; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3654032
  • Lee YC, Lu B, Edwards RR, Wasan AD, Nassikas NJ, Clauw DJ, Solomon DH, Karlson EW. The role of sleep problems in central pain processing in rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Rheum. 2013 Jan;65(1):59-68. doi: 10.1002/art.37733. PubMed PMID: 23124650; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3535519.
  • Liao KP, Kurreeman F, Li G, Duclos G, Murphy S, Guzman R, Cai T, Gupta N, Gainer V, Schur P, Cui J, Denny JC, Szolovits P, Churchill S, Kohane I, Karlson EW, Plenge RM. Associations of autoantibodies, autoimmune risk alleles, and clinical diagnoses from the electronic medical records in rheumatoid arthritis cases and non-rheumatoid arthritis controls. Arthritis Rheum. 2013 Mar;65(3):571-81. doi: 10.1002/art.37801. PubMed PMID: 23233247; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3582761.
  • Ananthakrishnan AN, Gainer VS, Perez RG, Cai T, Cheng SC, Savova G, Chen P, Szolovits P, Xia Z, De Jager PL, Shaw SY, Churchill S, Karlson EW, Kohane I, Perlis RH, Plenge RM, Murphy SN, Liao KP. Psychiatric co-morbidity is associated  with increased risk of surgery in Crohn's disease. Aliment Pharmacol Ther. 2013 Feb;37(4):445-54. doi: 10.1111/apt.12195. Epub 2013 Jan 7. PubMed PMID: 23289600; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3552092.
  • Ananthakrishnan AN, Gainer VS, Cai T, Perez RG, Cheng SC, Savova G, Chen P, Szolovits P, Xia Z, De Jager PL, Shaw S, Churchill S, Karlson EW, Kohane I, Perlis RH, Plenge RM, Murphy SN, Liao KP. Similar risk of depression and anxiety following surgery or hospitalization for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.  Am J Gastroenterol. 2013 Apr;108(4):594-601. doi: 10.1038/ajg.2012.471. Epub 2013 Jan 22. PubMed PMID: 23337479; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3627544.

Awards and honors

  • 2006: Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award: Excellence in clinical research, American College of Rheumatology         
  • 2013: Senior Faculty Mentoring Award: Excellence in mentoring, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Contact

Email: ekarlson@partners.org

 

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