Research/Areas of Interest
Developing workflows and informatics tools to advance personalized analysis of future health
Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS)
- Harvard University (PhD)
Biography
Bruce S. Kristal, PhD is a Senior Scientist at the HNRCA. His work centers on advancing personalized risk analysis for future chronic/age-related diseases based on a combination of blood-based biomarkers (e.g., metabolomics, lipidomics), adiposity and adiposity phenotypes, diet quantity and quality, and other lifestyle factors. The goal is to be able to use the knowledge gained from these studies to predict long-term disease risk in individuals, which could enable possible protective interventions and/or increased monitoring so as to maximize healthspan. He has worked across disciplines, resolving issues at the levels of analytical chemistry and informatics as well as in the biological and clinical realms. He was a leader in the early development of metabolomics. He is a co-inventor of 10 patents in metabolomics that are the core intellectual property of Metabolon, a leader in the field. He served as the founding secretary (2004-2008) and founding member of the Board of Directors (2004-2011) of the Metabolomics Society. His current work centers around the development of a robust, domain- and distribution-independent informatics approach, termed DIRAC, that enables assessing the utility of directly combining multiple mathematical models; this would enable, for example, integration of metabolomics data with other data sources in such a way as to fully maximize the use of the information that is carried in each domain, without requiring additional training data or incurring additional costs.