Amit V. Khera, MD MSc, is a cardiologist, human geneticist, and population biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), group leader within 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.
His research program (kheralab.org) 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 and identify molecular subtypes of cardiometabolic diseases.
Dr. Khera has authored more than 90 scientific publications, including lead or senior-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. His work has been recognized as among the top ten research advances by the American Heart Association (in both 2016 and 2018), and the National Human Genome Research Institute (in 2020), and he is 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 founded and is co-leading a Preventive Genomics Clinic at MGH to provide a clinical infrastructure for genome-first medicine.