Massachusetts General Hospital
Cardiologist
Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Genomic Medicine
Associate Director of the Precision Medicine Unit
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Merkin Institute Fellow
Harvard Medical School
Assistant Professor
Amit V. Khera, MD, MSc, is a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Associate Director of the Precision Medicine Unit in the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, Associate Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics and Merkin Institute Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School.
He received his MD with Alpha Omega Alpha distinction from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and went on to complete clinical training in Internal Medicine and cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MGH. He completed a Masters of Science at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Sekar Kathiresan in human genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard prior to accepting a faculty position.
His research program uses genetic variation as a tool to uncover new biology and enable enhanced clinical care informed by inherited susceptibility.
He has developed expertise in epidemiology, clinical medicine, and human genetics. Among his scientific contributions, he pioneered use of a new approach to quantify genetic risk (‘genome-wide polygenic scores’) for common diseases, developed biomarkers that provide new biologic insights, and analyzed large-scale gene sequencing data to highlight key pathways driving risk for cardiometabolic disease.
Dr. Khera has authored more than 60 scientific publications, including lead-authored publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Genetics, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and Circulation. He is a 2017 recipient of the National Lipid Association Junior Faculty Award and the 2019 recipient of the Douglas P. Zipes Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the American College of Cardiology.
In tandem with his research efforts he is co-leading a new Preventive Genomics Clinic at MGH to provide a clinical infrastructure for genome-first medicine.
