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Benjamin Neale is a core institute member at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, where he is co-director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and serves on the institute’s Executive Leadership Team. He serves as associate director of flagship disease projects for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Ó³»­´«Ã½. 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 an associate professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

As a statistical geneticist and leader of global genetic analysis projects, 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 from biobanks around the world. He and his team develop statistical methods to interpret such data and use AI in the study of mental illness. 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 developed Hail, the engine for scalable genetic analysis that is used worldwide for applications such as systematic genetic discovery for all ICD codes in UK Biobank or gnomAD, the world's allele frequency reference. Neale has 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 has co-led and contributed to many large-scale international collaborations, including the Schizophrenia Exome Sequencing Meta-analysis (SCHEMA) consortium, the Bipolar Exome (BipEx) sequencing project, the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative, and the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative.

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.

Areas of expertise: Statistical genetics; large-scale, global genetic analysis and collaborations; biobanks; data science; psychiatric genetics, particularly of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; genome analysis assays; cloud computing; AI