Clary Clish, Ph.D.
Senior Director of the Metabolomics Platform, Institute Scientist
Clary Clish is the senior director of the Metabolomics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is also an institute scientist. Clish, who joined the Broad Institute in 2008, is an expert in the development and application of technologies for the systematic analysis of endogenous metabolites in biological specimens. His lab works in collaboration with groups, from both within the Broad Institute and the external research community, on projects that range in scope from metabolic phenotyping of model systems to large human cohort studies. Contributions from the platform have included the discovery of plasma metabolic signatures that indicate future risk of developing diabetes in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort, 4-12 years before clinical diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, as well as the discovery of early indicators of pancreatic cancer in humans years before clinical diagnosis.
Prior to joining the Broad Institute, Clish held senior and executive management positions in the biotechnology industry from 2001-2008, including vice president of discovery at Gene Logic Inc. and director of metabolite biochemistry at Beyond Genomics Inc. From 1997-2001, Clish was a postdoctoral fellow and instructor in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Serhan at the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. In the Serhan laboratory, his work focused on understanding the roles of lipid mediators in acute inflammation and its resolution. Along with Serhan, Clish discovered and characterized a new class of anti-inflammatory lipid mediators that have since been named “resolvins.”
Clish received his B.Sc. from McGill University in chemistry and biological sciences and his Ph.D. from Portland State University.
July 2018