Noël Burtt

Noël Burtt is the director of operations and development of the Diabetes Research & Knowledge Portals in the Medical and Population Genetics Program and Metabolism Program at the Broad Institute. Her work centers on the operational and organizational leadership of large-scale, international genetics consortia and public/private partnerships for human genetics studies, with a focus on type 2 diabetes and cardiometabolic diseases. In the Diabetes Research & Knowledge Portals, Burtt oversees the data coordination platform and efforts to serve the international diabetes genetics research community. She also stewards new collaborations and research initiatives and directs community outreach, education, and external relations for the KPN software platform for complex diseases.

Burtt is one of the leaders of the T2D Knowledge Portal (T2DKP), an open-access platform for type 2 diabetes genetic data. She helped to lead and coordinate the Accelerating Medicines Partnership for Type 2 Diabetes (AMP-T2D), a consortium bridging government, industry, and nonprofit organizations that worked to facilitate development of new therapies for complex diseases such as diabetes. In 2020, AMP-T2D expanded to include other complex diseases and is now known as the Accelerating Medicines Partnership for Common Metabolic Diseases (AMP-CMD). Burtt was instrumental in creating the Knowledge Portals for cardiovascular disease, stroke, type 1 diabetes, and sleep disorders that, along with the T2DKP, comprise the Common Metabolic Diseases Knowledge Portal (CMDKP). She is a principal investigator on the grant currently funding the CMDKP. Within AMP-T2D and AMP-CMD, Burtt has worked to facilitate data deposition and shape the ethos of the Knowledge Portals for the consortium and the larger community of common disease researchers.

Prior to her work at the Broad, Burtt joined the Whitehead Center for Genome Research in 1999 to help develop and scale technologies for genotyping and sequencing, tools that were used in some of the first genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In this role, Burtt played a pivotal role in organizing several international GWAS consortia (type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, myocardial infarction, coronary artery disease, lipids, and HIV). Burtt has also managed two public-private partnerships with Novartis and Pfizer as part of the effort to use human genetics to develop better therapies for diabetes. She has contributed to more than 126 publications of genomic studies of diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other disorders.

Trained in molecular biology and human genetics, Burtt received her B.S. from the University of New Hampshire.

September 2021