Michael Talkowski, Ph.D.

Michael Talkowski

Michael Talkowski is an institute member at the Broad Institute. He is an associate professor of neurology, with cross-appointments in psychiatry and pathology at Harvard Medical School, and a faculty member of the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Talkowski’s research program explores the impact of genomic variation on human disease, with a particular interest on the relationship between genome structure and function. His group has helped to define the landscape of complex genomic rearrangements that exist in all humans and differ between individuals, and has developed open resources of such variation across populations. He has led large-scale gene discovery efforts and cellular modeling studies in autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders, and has applied new approaches to detect and interpret genomic variation in prenatal and pediatric diagnostics. 

Talkowski received undergraduate degrees in biology and psychology, and a Ph.D. in human genetics with a focus in genetic epidemiology and psychiatric genetics. He joined Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad’s Program in Medical and Population Genetics as a postdoctoral fellow to study neurodevelopmental genomics in 2008, and was appointed to the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2011. He is currently a faculty mentor in both the Harvard Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) and Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) Ph.D. programs.

May 2019