Project Team

David Altshuler, M.D., PhD

David Altshuler’s laboratory aims to characterize and catalogue patterns of human genetic variation, and apply this information to understand the inherited contribution to common diseases such as type 2 diabetes and prostate cancer.

Altshuler has been a leader in the SNP Consortium and International HapMap Consortium , public-private partnerships that have created genome-wide maps of human genetic diversity. These public databases, containing over 10 million common human genetic variants of which 3 million were genotyped in each of 270 samples, are now used to guide design and interpretation of genetic association studies.

In long-term collaboration with clinical investigators, Altshuler’s group has developed methods for defining causal relationships between sequence variation and human disease. In addition to showing the first reproducible association of a common genetic variation with type 2 diabetes (PPARG P12A), he and collaborators have performed large-scale association studies in over 7,000 patients to resolve true association and those that cannot be reproduced.

Dr. Altshuler is a Clinical Scholar in Translational Research of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Charles E. Culpeper Medical Scholar of the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund, and winner of the Stephen Krane Award of the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has received the Richard and Susan Smith Pinnacle Award of the American Diabetes Association, and the “Freedom to Discovery” Award from the Foundation of Bristol Myers Squibb. He is a member of Advisory Boards at The National Institutes of Health, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, The Wellcome Trust and Merck Research Laboratories, on the Editorial Board of Annual Reviews of Human Genetics and Genomics, and the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science.

Professor Altshuler is one of four Founding Members and Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics of The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a unique research collaboration of Harvard, MIT, The Whitehead Institute, and the Harvard Hospitals.

Kim Fortun, PhD

Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the study of environmental issues, particularly as they affect human health. Her work has examined uneven distributions of environmental health risks and problems among social groups; how scientific information relevant to environmental health is produced and then used in regulatory and legal decision-making; environmental health risk communication; and strategies used by affected populations to understand and improve their health status.

Kim Fortun’s first book, Advocacy After Bhopal ( University of Chicago, 2001), examines response to the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in the United States and in the international arena. Moving from hospitals and courtrooms in India to meetings with engineers, lawyers, and environmental justice activists in the U.S., the book examines how a variety of stakeholders responded to increasing concern about toxic chemicals in the 1990s. In 2003, Advocacy After Bhopal was awarded the biannual Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.

Building on her research focused on the Bhopal disaster, Fortun’s current research examines the development of information resources to support environmental science and governance. One focus is on the effects of “right-to-know legislation” (passed in the mid 1980’s as a response to the Bhopal disaster), which has dramatically increased the quantity and quality of environmental risk information available to the public. Another focus is on the development of information resources to support the environmental health sciences, particularly as they intersect with genetics research. Fortun is examining the kinds of information infrastructure that will be needed to support the emerging field of toxicogenomics, which aims to understand the impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Using asthma as an index condition, Fortun is also examining needs for information infrastructure to support integration of robust measures of the ambient environment into studies of gene-environment interactions.

In all of her work, Fortun aims to develop method and theory to support understanding of the complex ways different variables, scales and types of systems – biological, economic, cultural, etc, -- interact in the production of outcomes such as human disease or food insecurity. She also works to develop the collaborations with scientists, affected communities, artists and other stakeholders necessary for understanding and responding to complex problems.

Kim Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer, and director of the Center for Ethics in Complex Systems. She is also editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology. Fortun received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in 1993.

Kenneth Olden, PhD, Sc.D., L.H.D.

Kenneth Olden, PhD, Sc.D., L.H.D., is the most recent past Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He held these positions from 1991 to 2005. He was the first African-American to become Director of one of the 18 institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the history of the agency. He has returned full time to his research position as Chief of the Metastasis Section, Laboratory of Molecular Carcinogenesis at the NIEHS, which he also held while director.

Dr. Olden received his PhD degree in Cell Biology/Biochemistry from Temple University. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees; namely, Sc.D. degrees from Metropolitan University, San Juan, Puerto Rico, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; the University of Rochester; and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Tulane University. He also holds an honorary L.H.D. from the college of Charleston. After completing his PhD degree, he was a Research Fellow and Instructor of Physiology at Harvard University (1970-1974), a Senior Staff Fellow and then a Research Biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Division of Cancer Biology and Diagnosis, National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD (1974-1979), Associate Director for Research, Howard University Cancer Center, and Associate Professor of Oncology, Howard University Medical School, Washington, DC (1979-1982), Professor of Oncology and Deputy Director Howard University Cancer Center (1982-1985) and Director (1985-1991), and Professor and Chair of the Department of Oncology (1985-1991).

His honors and awards are too numerous to detail, but among them are: the Toxicology Forum’s Distinguished Fellow Award, the Presidential Distinguished Executive Rank Award, the Presidential Meritorious Executive Rank Award for sustained extraordinary accomplishments, the HHS Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, and the American College of Toxicology’s First Distinguished Service Award. He was unique among Institute Directors in that he was awarded three of the most prestigious awards in Public Health: The Calver Award (2002), the Sedgwick Medal (2004), the Julius B. Richmond Award (2005), and the National Minority Health Leadership Award (2005) from the University of Pittsburgh. He was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, in 1994. He is on the editorial board of numerous journals, serving in most instances as Associate Editor. He has been cited in Current Contents, Life Sciences for having published two of the 100 most-cited papers in 1978-79, one of which was subsequently designated as a “citation classic.” Over 26 visiting fellows or post-docs have trained in his laboratory, and he has published over 120 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. In addition, Dr. Olden has published more than 45 review articles and book chapters.

He has chaired/co-chaired numerous national/international meetings, and has been an invited speaker, keynote speaker at over 150 symposia seminars, etc.

Alexandra E. Shields, PhD

Alexandra E. Shields, PhD is Director of the newly formed Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities. She also holds faculty appointments in Medicine (Health Policy) at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shields received her PhD in Social Policy from the Heller School, Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Health Policy Scholar and an AHCPR Fellow. While at Brandeis, she also served as staff researcher for the Council on the Economic Impact of Health System Change. Prior to her doctoral work, Dr. Shields held several senior positions in state government, including Director of Ambulatory Care at the Massachusetts Rate Setting Commission (now the Division for Health Care Finance and Policy). She also holds a B.A., summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, in Sociology and Theology, and a Master’s degree, with distinction, in Theology from Boston College, where she was the Bernard J. Lonergan Scholar in Theology.

Dr. Shields has more than 15 years experience working on issues related to access to health care for low-income and uninsured individuals, in both government and academic settings. Dr. Shields’ principal research interests include issues related to the quality of care provided to underserved populations, health disparities, and challenges associated with clinical integration of new genetic technologies. Dr. Shields has been a PI on studies assessing provider performance and racial disparities in the quality of asthma care provided to Medicaid-enrolled children. She served as a senior consultant and staff writer for the IOM study, America’s Health Care Safety Net: Intact but Endangered. Dr. Shields is currently PI on a 5-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study clinical and ethical issues related to tailoring smoking cessation treatment by genotype. More recently, Dr. Shields was awarded a NIH-funded ELSI P20 grant to develop a Center of Excellence in ELSI Research on “Genetics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,” which examines the complex intersection of emerging genetic research and the persistent problem of health disparities through in-depth analysis of three key clinical areas: tobacco dependence, asthma, and diabetes. This initiative includes both health services research and policy research, including analyses of current issues of pharmacogenetic treatment access within the Medicaid population. She is also PI of a new NHGRI R01 project investigating attitudes and beliefs of Black and white Americans regarding the role of genetics in addiction and smokers’ willingness to undergo genetic testing in order to be match to optimal treatment. Dr. Shields is founder of the Consortium on Complex Chronic Illness, Quality and Equity. In this capacity she leads several studies addressing health outcomes for highly prevalent chronic conditions among privately insured, Medicaid, TRICARE, and VA populations.

Kevin Weiss, M.D.

Kevin Weiss, MD, directs the Institute for Healthcare Studies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He is Professor of Medicine, in the Division of General Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He also directs the VA’s Midwest Center for Health Services and Policy Research located at Hines and Chicago VA Medical Centers.

He began his academic career as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine while also serving as a special assistant to Program Director for the Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. From there he served as Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at Rush Medical College and Director of the Center for Health Services Research at the Rush Primary Care Institute, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Weiss received his MD from the University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School, clinical training in Internal Medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, an MPH from the University of Illinois School of Public Health and a Master’s in Health Services Administration from Harvard University School of Public Health. He did his post-doctoral training fellowship at the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was also a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar.
Dr. Weiss’ research is focused on issues of quality and access in primary care, conducting epidemiological and health services research projects involving access to care, guideline implementation, chronic care management, outcomes measurement, and quality improvement with a specific focus on asthma. He has chaired the Clinical Effectiveness Assessment Committee of the American College of Physicians (ACP), being responsible for developing the College’s clinical guidelines. Currently he chairs the ACP’s Performance Measurement Subcommittee. He represents the Colleges at the National Quality Forum and is a college representative to the AMA Physicians Consortium for Performance Improvement. Dr. Weiss has served as the Chair of the National Committee on Quality Assurance’s Asthma and Respiratory Measurement Advisory Panels since their inception, and serves on the NCQA’s Clinical Performance Measures Committee. He has served on Institute of Medicine Committees which developed the reports, “Crossing the Quality Chasm,” and “Identifying Priority Areas for Quality Improvement.” Dr. Weiss chairs the Performance Measures subcommittee of the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance (AQA).

Rosalind Wright, M.D., M.P.H.

Dr. Wright’s research program focuses on the epidemiolgy of chronic respiratory disease in both adults (adult-onset asthma, COPD) and children (childhood asthma). Utilizing multiple longitudinal cohort designs, she is examining the role of varied psychosocial stressors (e.g., adverse life events, violence, social deprivation) on asthma morbidity. Environmental stressors may impact asthma morbidity through neuroimmunological mechanisms which are adversely impacted and/or buffered by social networks, social support, and individual psychological functioning. In addition, life stress may impact on health beliefs and behaviors that may affect asthma management. Whereas earlier psychosomatic models have supported a role for psychological stress in contributing to variable asthma morbidity among those with existing disease, a growing appreciation of the interactions between behavioral, neural, endocrine, and immune processes suggest a role for these psychosocial factors in the genesis of asthma as well. Through collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of investigators at the Channing Laboratory and the Harvard School of Public Health, these studies are designed to systematically examine not only traditional asthma risk factors, but also the characteristics of the environments (i.e., stress) in which individuals live, behaviors develop, and disease risks are realized. Potential mechanisms linking stress to asthma are also explored through the epidemiologic measurement and analyses of biomarkers reflecting differentiation of the immune system. Specifically, our laboratory examines the influence of stress on T-helper cell differentiation as reflected in cytokine profiles and IgE production (TH2 phenotype). Other projects focus on the role of psychosocial factors (i.e., negative/positive emotions, stress) on lung function decline and COPD risk.