TimYuTim Yu, MD, PhD

Principal Consultant/Co-Founder

As a principal Consultant in Claritas, Tim plays a key role in informatics and software development used in analyzing and interpreting genomic data sets. Tim Yu is a neurologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital with broad expertise in genomics, molecular biology, informatics, and personalized medicine. His research focuses on developing and applying high throughput sequencing methods to human genetic disorders. He developed early methods for sequence capture and constructed one of the first large scale data pipelines for detecting, annotating, and interpreting disease variants from human genomic data. Working with Chris Walsh (Genetics Division Chief at BCH), Tim has identified over a dozen novel disease genes for intellectual disability and autism. He remains active as a clinician, evaluating and treating autistic patients at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Lurie Center.

Tim obtained his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard, and his MD and PhD from the University of California at San Francisco Medical Scientist Training program. Tim’s graduate work uncovered basic genetic mechanisms for wiring the central nervous system. He completed is medical internship at MGH and his neurology residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MGH, during which he also served as Chief Resident.

Peter ParkPeter J Park, PhD

Principal Consultant/Co-founder

Peter is a computational biologist at Harvard Medical School and provides expertise in bioinformatics and cancer genomics to Claritas. Peter’s research centers on development of algorithms for analysis of high-throughput sequencing data, particularly with respect to copy number and structural variation analysis in cancer genomes. His laboratory at the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics consists of 15-20 bioinformaticians and has analyzed whole-genome sequencing data from hundreds of cancer patients. Peter has been a leader in NIH consortium projects, including Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The Park laboratory has published prodigiously, including many influential papers in Science, Nature, and Cell. In the past year alone, Peter has given more than 20 lectures worldwide on his research, including several keynote addresses.

Peter received his undergraduate degree in applied mathematics at Harvard and a PhD in applied mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, specializing in numerical analysis of partial differential equations. Peter became interested in molecular biology and genomics during a post-doctoral fellowship in the Biostatistics Department at the Harvard School of Public Health. He moved to Boston Children’s Hospital in 2001 and currently holds the HMS academic appointment
of Associate Professor.