Elizabeth Karlson received her Bachelor’s of Arts from Brown University, her medical degree at Johns Hopkins Medical School and completed internal medicine and rheumatology training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Karlson is a rheumatologist and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is Director of the Rheumatic Disease Epidemiology Research Program for the Section of Clinical Sciences, Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She serves as co-Director for the Human Immunology Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Karlson’s research interests are in rheumatic disease epidemiology and outcomes, genetics, gene-environment interactions, and bioinformatics analysis of electronic health records for clinical and translational research. She is funded by the National Institutes of Health and has a Mid-Career Investigator Award to support mentoring and teaching of rheumatology fellows and junior faculty. She has published over 140 original articles.
She serves as Co-Investigator, Phenotyping Center Director, and member of the Executive Committee for the Partners HealthCare Biobank that aims to collect samples, family history, lifestyle and environmental survey data linked with comprehensive health information from the electronic health record from 100,000 Partners HealthCare patients. She serves on the Advisory Council on Biology and Medicine, Alpert Medical School, Brown University. 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. She has received the Henry Kunkel Young Investigator 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.”
