Elizabeth Karlson

Elizabeth Karlson

Professor of Medicine, Co-Director, Partners HealthCare Biobank / Director, Rheumatic Disease Epidemiology Research Program

Elizabeth Karlson, MD, MS is Director of the Rheumatic Disease Epidemiology Research Program for the Section of Clinical Sciences, Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation, and Immunity in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Karlson received her MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is now a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Karlson has conducted patient-oriented and translational research in rheumatic diseases for > 26 years with expertise in longitudinal cohort recruitment and retention, disease epidemiology and outcomes research, and the use of bioinformatics to define phenotypes in electronic health records. Additionally, Dr. Karlson leads multi-site research studies as MPI including the eMERGE III Clinical Center at Mass General Brigham (contact PI) and the All of Us Research Program that has enrolled 23,000+ New England participants where 75% are under-represented in biomedical research. Dr. Karlson is co-Director of the Mass General Brigham Biobank, enrolling 124,000+ subjects over 10 years, storing buffy coat, DNA, plasma, serum linked to curated electronic health record data in a Biobank Data Portal for 80,000+ subjects. She coordinates bioinformatics analyses for phenotype algorithms for the Biobank Portal and eMERGE network.