Gil Alterovitz | Director, Biomedical Cybernetics Laboratory Computational Health Informatics Program
Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics

Prof. Gil Alterovitz is a faculty at Harvard Medical School in the Center for Biomedical Informatics.   He is Director of the Biomedical Cybernetics Laboratory and core faculty member of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program.  He is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is co-chair of the HL7 Clinical Genomics workgroup and on the Clinical Workgroup core executive group of the Global Alliance. His research focuses on integrating genomics within healthcare settings as well as international collaborations involving genomics/clinical data integration.   His work on integrative methods for “big data” in the biomedical informatics space has been published or presented in more than 30 peer-reviewed publications ranging from academic journals and international conferences to three books (including “Systems Bioinformatics: An Engineering Case-based Approach,” ranked #1 in new Amazon bioinformatics category).  He is a faculty member of the Harvard curriculum committee for the Biomedical Informatics Masters and Bioinformatics PhD programs- where he and his upcoming book (under contract by MIT Press) have served a role in shaping the program Alterovitz has been recognized for innovation by several awards (e.g. Epstein award by the American Medical Informatics Association and the Motorola Intellectual Property Award).   Dr. Alterovitz has appeared and cited on various national and international news and media outlets such as USA Today, National Public Radio/WBUR, Canada’s CBC radio, and Spain’s El Mundo for his research.  He was one of the US delegates to Canada under the US-Canada Fulbright Program- working on genomics at the University of Toronto.  He was also selected as one of approximately 20 international delegates to Canada25 (to discuss healthcare/technology) to put together a policy paper that was covered internationally.  He was invited to be one of the key panelists in the BEF 2013 (Babson Entrepreneurial Forum) to discuss “Gazing into the Crystal Ball: Opportunities in the Next Decade.” A large component of Dr. Alterovitz’s work involves international components.  Dr. Alterovitz has a joint faculty appointment with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and NIH/NSFC-funded collaborations at Fudan University (China).  He is dedicated to his students’ academic success and learning.  He has served as a PhD/masters advisor mentor for students from several institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern University in Boston and internationally in Asia: National University of Singapore, Xian Jiao Tong University (China), The University of Science and Technology of China, National Taiwan University, National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Vignana Bharathi Institute of Technology (India) and others.  Dr. Alterovitz has also founded/co-founded several companies and has served as a consultant to clients from Fortune 500 companies to startups.