Eric Schadt, Ph.D.

Dr. Schadt is Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, and Jean C. & James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Schadt’s lab and broader efforts at the Icahn Institute focus on the integration of diverse, very large scale data to build predictive models of disease that can aid in providing more accurate diagnoses of disease and how best to treat it.

Dr. Schadt is an expert on the generation and integration of very large-scale sequence variation, molecular profiling and clinical data in disease populations for constructing molecular networks that define disease states and link molecular biology to physiology. He is known for calling for a shift in molecular biology toward a network-oriented view of living systems to complement the reductionist, single-gene approaches that currently dominate biology in order to more accurately model the complexity of biological systems. Dr. Schadt’s research has provided novel insights into what is needed to master diverse, large-scale data collected on normal and disease populations in order to elucidate the complexity of disease and make more informed decisions in the drug discovery arena. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals, and contributed to a number of discoveries relating to the genetic basis of common human diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Schadt is also a founding member of Sage Bionetworks, an open-access genomics initiative designed to build and support databases and an accessible platform for creating innovative dynamic disease models. Prior to joining Mount Sinai in 2011, he was Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences, the next-generation sequencing technology provider. Previously, Dr. Schadt was Executive Scientific Director of Genetics at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. in Seattle, and before Rosetta, Dr. Schadt was a Senior Research Scientist at Roche Bioscience. He received his B.A. in applied mathematics and computer science from California Polytechnic State University, his M.A. in pure mathematics from University of California, Davis, and his Ph.D. in bio-mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles (requiring Ph.D. candidacy in molecular biology and mathematics).