Shamil Sunyaev

About

Shamil Sunyaev, PhD, is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is a computational genomicist and geneticist whose research encompasses many aspects of population genetic variation, including the origin of mutations, the effect of allelic variants on molecular function, population and evolutionary genetics, and the genetics of human complex and Mendelian traits. He has developed several computational and statistical methods that are widely adopted by the community. Dr. Sunyaev obtained his PhD in molecular biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and completed his postdoctoral training in bioinformatics at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He is an Institute Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and co-organizes the Boston Evolutionary Genomics Supergroup.

Research topics

• Biology
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Medicine
• Cell biology
• Bioinformatics
• Computational biology
• Demography
• Biochemistry
• Evolutionary biology

Selected publications

• A cross-disorder dosage sensitivity map of the human genome

  Cell · 2022 · 356 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Identification of cancer driver genes based on nucleotide context

  Nature Genetics · 2020-02-01 · 273 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The landscape of tolerated genetic variation in humans and primates

  Science · 2023-06-01 · 173 citations

  articleOpen access

  Personalized genome sequencing has revealed millions of genetic differences between individuals, but our understanding of their clinical relevance remains largely incomplete. To systematically decipher the effects of human genetic variants, we obtained whole-genome sequencing data for 809 individuals from 233 primate species and identified 4.3 million common protein-altering variants with orthologs in humans. We show that these variants can be inferred to have nondeleterious effects in humans ba…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Parkinson’s disease protein alpha-synuclein is a modulator of processing bodies and mRNA stability

  Cell · 2022 · 162 citations

  DOI

• De novo mutations across 1,465 diverse genomes reveal mutational insights and reductions in the Amish founder population

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 110 citations

  ), which suggest that variation in DNM rate is significantly shaped by nonadditive genetic effects and the environment.

  DOI

Recent grants

• The origin, the function and the phenotypic impact of human alleles

  NIH · $7.2M · 2018–2028

• NIH Grant R01DK095721

  NIH · $1.9M · 2018

• Functional and population genetic architectures of complex disease

  NIH · $8.7M · 2013–2027

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Redline

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  174 shared

• Brian E. Cade

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  142 shared

• Tamar Sofer

  Hadassah Medical Center

  108 shared

• Sung Chun

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  106 shared

• Jerome I. Rotter

  UCLA Medical Center

  106 shared

• Richa Saxena

  Harvard University

  104 shared

• Daniel J. Balick

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  100 shared

• Heming Wang

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  95 shared

Labs

• Sunyaev LabPI

Similar researchers at Harvard University

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• Tianxi Caih-82