Cambridge, Mass., USA - May 24, 2012, Cambridge, Mass., USA - Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated announced that David Altshuler has joined its board of directors as an independent director.
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Dr. Altshuler is a Professor of Genetics and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he has served on the faculty since 2000. He is also one of the four founding members of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained as a clinical endocrinologist and a human geneticist, Dr. Altshuler's clinical work is focused on characterizing patterns of variation in human genetics and applying this information to help isolate the genetic contribution to common diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Through his work with multiple public-private partnerships, including the SNP Consortium, the International Haplotype Map Project and the 1000 Genomes Project, Dr. Altshuler has helped further the scientific community's understanding of DNA sequence variation in the human genome and its contribution to the development of specific diseases. At the Broad Institute, he has directed its Program in Medical and Population Genetics since 2003 and has served as Chief Academic Officer since 2009. He is also on the faculty of Massachusetts General Hospital's Department of Molecular Biology, the Diabetes Unit of the Department of Medicine and the Center for Human Genetic Research.
Dr. Altshuler has received numerous awards for his research and clinical activities related to human genetics, including the Stephen Krane Award from Massachusetts General Hospital, which recognized him as the Department of Medicine's top young investigator, the 2011 Curt Stern Award of the American Society of Human Genetics given for outstanding scientific achievements in the last 10 years and the Richard and Susan Smith Pinnacle Award of the American Diabetes Association, which recognized his research into the contributing genetic cause of diabetes.
He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the US Institute of Medicine. In 2010, Dr. Altshuler was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics. He has served on advisory boards for many leading institutions, government organizations and nonprofit foundations, including The National Institutes of Health, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, The Wellcome Trust and Merck Research Laboratories. ■