David M. Altshuler M.D., Ph.D. — Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Research at Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Dr. David M. Altshuler, M.D., Ph.D. has been Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Research at Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated since January 2015. Dr. Altshuler is an Associate Professor of Genetics and of Medicine of Massachusetts General Hospital. Since 2012, Dr. Altshuler has been Adjunct Professor of Biology at MIT. He is an Associate Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, where Dr. Altshuler has served on the faculty since 2000. 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 was one of the Founding Core Members and served as Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics of The Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Deputy Director of Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. 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 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. Dr. Altshuler was a leader in the SNP Consortium and International HapMap Consortium, public-private partnerships that created genome-wide maps of human genetic diversity that now guide the design and interpretation of genetic association studies. Dr. Altshuler serves as Member of Medical and Scientific Advisory Board at MPM Capital, MPM BioVentures IV, L.P. and MPM BioVentures. He is a Member of Advisory Boards at The National Institutes of Health, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, The Wellcome Trust and Merck Research Laboratories; on the Editorial Board of Annual Reviews of Human Genetics and Genomics; and the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science. He served as a Director of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated from May 24, 2012 to December 9, 2014. Since 2010, he served as Director of the American Society of Human Genetics. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the US Institute of Medicine. Dr. Altshuler is a Clinical Scholar in Translational Research of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Charles E. Culpeper Medical Scholar. He 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 received the Richard and Susan Smith Pinnacle Award of the American Diabetes Association and the Freedom to Discover Award from the Foundation of Bristol-Myers Squibb. He received a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his internship, residency and clinical fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital.