NIH’s All of Us Research Program Selects Next Chief Medical and Scientific Officer

November 3, 2021
Portrait of Geoffrey Ginsburg

Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg

Geoffrey Ginsburg, M.D., Ph.D., has been selected by the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program to serve as its next chief medical and scientific officer. He will be responsible for helping set the scientific vision and strategy for the program. He will also oversee the program’s collection and curation of data, and integration of new data types to support a wide range of impactful scientific discoveries.

“Geoff has led significant scientific and clinical discoveries in precision medicine, but perhaps more importantly, his leadership has provided a roadmap for impactful integration of this novel field throughout health care,” said Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., chief executive officer of the All of Us Research Program. “I look forward to tapping into his extraordinary vision as we work together to accelerate health research and medical breakthroughs through the development and use of the All of Us Research Program data.”

As founding director for the Center for Applied Genomics & Precision Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine, Dr. Ginsburg pioneered translational genomics, the development of novel diagnostics, and precision medicine. He also served as a professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Duke University School of Medicine, professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, and a professor in the School of Nursing. Prior to these roles, he held leadership roles at Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. (now Takeda Pharmaceuticals), and was a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, where he was director of Preventive Cardiology at Beth Israel Hospital and led a laboratory in applied genetics of cardiovascular diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Ginsburg is an internationally recognized expert in genomics and personalized medicine with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has had his research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Gates Foundation, and others. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a strong commitment to interdisciplinary science and innovation, with work spanning oncology, infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders. He also holds key leadership roles, serving as co-chair of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Genomic and Precision Health, a founding co-chair of the International HundredK+ Cohorts Consortium, and founder and president of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC), a not-for-profit organization aimed at creating international partnerships to advance the implementation of precision medicine.

“We are on the cusp of realizing the full potential of precision medicine, with the All of Us Research Program enabling this paradigm shift,” said Ginsburg. “I’m excited to be at the forefront of this effort, working alongside participants, partners, researchers, and the NIH scientific community to continue to demonstrate the impact of this collaborative effort.”

At the All of Us Research Program, Dr. Ginsburg will lead the Division of Medical and Scientific Research, working with diverse stakeholders to develop and lead the program’s scientific vision and strategy. His team will map out an agenda to inform the overall protocol roadmap and data science strategy, that includes identifying and integrating new data streams, building and maintaining collaborations with local, national and international partners and studies, and ensuring the availability of high-quality health data for the research community.

All of Us is a historic effort to gather data from one million or more people living in the United States to transform and accelerate research and improve health. By learning more about individual differences in lifestyle, environment, and biology, researchers will uncover novel and important paths toward precision medicine. All of Us aims to reflect America’s rich diversity in its participants, including groups that have been historically underrepresented in biomedical research. With a robust and growing set of data generously contributed by participants over time – through surveys, electronic health records, biospecimens, wearable technologies, and more – the All of Us Research Program’s Researcher Workbench supports researchers from different backgrounds in making discoveries that lead to new prevention strategies and treatments to address foundational health challenges.

For more information, go to AllofUs.nih.gov.

All of Us, the All of Us logo, and “The Future of Health Begins with You” are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.