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.
“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.”
