Interview

Isaac Kohane speaks to Sarah Miller, Assistant Commissioning Editor Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, is the Lawerence J Henderson Professor of Pediatrics and Health Sciences Technology at Harvard Medical School (MA, USA), where he is also Director of the Countway Library of Medicine, the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and Co-Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Biomedical Informatics. In addition, he is Director of the Informatics for Integrating Biology to the Bedside (i2b2) center (MA, USA), one of seven NIH-funded National Centers for Biomedical Computing. Dr Kohane is also the Co-Director of the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics PhD Training Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He earned his Sc.B in Biology from Brown University (RI, USA), and his MD and PhD in computer science from Boston University (MA, USA). Dr Kohane leads multiple collaborations employing genomics and bioinformatics to study cancer and brain development, and he practices pediatric endocrinology at the Children’s Hospital Boston (MA, USA). He is involved in the development of multiple hospital computer systems which can be used as ‘living laboratories’, linking genetic information with clinical data to study the genetics of disease, whilst respecting patient privacy. Dr Kohane has developed cryptographic health identification systems, automated personal health records and peer-to-peer pathology information networks. He also leads NIH-funded initiatives for translating genomic research into the clinical environment, such the i2b2 initiative.