Kurt Christensen, PhD

Instructor in Population Medicine, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School

Kurt Christensen, PhD, is an Instructor in Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School whose research focuses on the medical, behavioral, and economic effects of integrating genomics into clinical and research settings. He has been an investigator on numerous high-profile NIH-funded trials of genomic information disclosure, including the REVEAL Study, which examined susceptibility testing for Alzheimer disease; the MedSeq Project which examined genome sequencing to adults; and the BabySeq Project, which examined exome sequencing of newborns. His published work has provided some of the earliest insight about the impact of population genomic screening for health systems, providers, and patients. Dr. Christensen is currently supported by an NIH Career Development focused on the cost-effectiveness of providing genetic screening to healthy adults. He is also a co-investigator on the PreEMPT Model, an NIH-funded effort to develop models to project the clinical and economic impact of newborn genomic screening. He also helps to lead a collaboration to examine the impact of providing genetic screening to patients of the Sanford Health System.