Benjamin Neale

Benjamin Neale is a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is also co-director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as associate director of flagship disease projects for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad. He is an associate professor in the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit (ATGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he directs the Genomics of Public Health Initiative. He is also an associate professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Neale is strongly committed to gaining insights into the genetics of common, complex human diseases with a heavy emphasis on severe mental illnesses. 

Neale’s research focuses on the generation and analysis of large-scale genomic datasets and the development of statistical methods to interpret such data. He has led large-scale international genetic studies of patients with ADHD, autism, age-related macular degeneration, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disorders. His lab leads the analysis of the ongoing rare variant discovery efforts for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Neale’s lab is also developing Hail, a cloud-native scalable analysis platform that has been used to perform systematic genetic association analyses of all ICD codes in the UK Biobank as well as curate the gnomAD database, one of the world’s largest allele frequency references. Neale has also been instrumental in the development of novel genomic assays including designing the exome chip, psychchip, and blended genome exome product, which have been used to assay millions of human DNA samples.

Neale studied at the University of Chicago and Virginia Commonwealth University, earning a B.Sc. in genetics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in human genetics from King’s College in London, UK. Neale completed his postdoctoral training in Mark Daly’s laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.