Benjamin Voight

Benjamin Voight is a research scientist in the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute. He is a population geneticist and statistician motivated to understand the genetic, biological, and evolutionary basis of metabolism in human populations. To accomplish this goal, he constructs statistical methods grounded in the principles of population biology and applies them to genetic data collected across entire human genomes.

Over ten years of research, Voight’s tools have helped reveal hundreds of genomic loci shaped by evolution in humans. These tools have also identified population changes likely to have influenced genetic diversity in European and African populations. In addition, the statistical pipelines Voight has developed for genetic data analysis have uncovered numerous risk factors associated with individual metabolic traits, identified genetic associations with plasma lipid levels that also impact risk of heart attack, and pinpointed individual genetic variants associated with multiple traits. Recently, he has focused on methods to implicate rare variants in human traits, statistical assessments of current DNA sequencing study designs, and examinations of established genetic associations in patients with very low or very high risk of type 2 diabetes.

Voight earned the Team Award for Outstanding Research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Clinical Research Day in May 2007, was a semi-finalist for the Trainee Research Award for the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in August 2009, and was a moderator of the session titled "Sequencing and Strategies: Rare Variants in Polygenic Traits" at the 60th Annual Meeting of the ASHG in November 2010. Voight joined the Broad in July 2006 after completing a Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Chicago.