Luke Ward

Director, Statistical Genetics at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

About

Computational biologist specializing in translating human genetics to drug discovery and development. 20 years experience in computational genomics, 15 years experience in human genetics, and 10 years experience in industry Publication record available at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=B6w750UAAAAJ

Experience

  • Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (7 yrs 7 mos)
    • Director, Statistical Genetics
      Aug 2024 - Present · 2 yrs

    • Associate Director, Statistical Genetics
      Feb 2022 - Aug 2024 · 2 yrs 7 mos

    • Principal Scientist
      Jan 2019 - Feb 2022 · 3 yrs 2 mos

      Statistical genetics for discovery, program, and product support

  • Senior Scientist at Amgen
    Aug 2015 - Jan 2019 · 3 yrs 6 mos

    • Providing interpretation and analysis of human genetics data for target characterization, validation, and issue resolution at all stages of Amgen's pipeline (discovery, preclinical, clinical, and postmarketing) • Leading efforts to incorporate genetics into interpretation of pharmacovigilance safety signals • Collaborating with outside investigators on several pharmacogenetics studies of adverse drug events • Coordinating toxicogenomics assays and computational support for other projects involving in-house RNA-Seq data • Advancing the science of using human genetics in drug safety by publishing retrospective analyses • Contributing as a computational biologist to a wide array of projects in a mechanistic and predictive toxicology group using iPSCs and other in vitro models of human systems • Systematically integrating GWAS and PheWAS to de-risk and prioritize the early pipeline

  • Visiting Scientist at deCODE genetics
    Mar 2016 - Sep 2016 · 7 mos

    • Annotated noncoding SNPs to translate GWAS associations to biological insights • Performed PheWAS on drug target genes to generate drug safety predictions

  • Bioinformatics Scientist at 5AM Solutions
    Jul 2014 - Jul 2015 · 1 yr 1 mo

    Provided contract biomedical informatics consulting for three clients: • Performed bioinformatics requirements analysis and UI design for a web-based oncology clinical trial exchange • Created a model to forecast clinical trial recruitment for a pharmaceutical company and provided competitive intelligence research • Served as a data scientist for a pharmaceutical company developing a clinical trial data management solution

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4 yrs 2 mos)
    • Research Scientist
      Jul 2014 - Jul 2014 · 1 mo

    • Postdoctoral Associate
      Jun 2010 - Jul 2014 · 4 yrs 2 mos

      Research in human regulatory genomics: • Conceived and performed integrative analyses of human functional, comparative, and population genomics data to interpret genome-wide association studies and evolutionary signatures, contributing to 14 peer-reviewed publications (four as first author) • Served as an analyst in the ENCODE, Roadmap Epigenomics, GTEx, and 29 Mammals projects • Built and maintained a popular web database, HaploReg, for systematic interpretation of disease-associated common variation (as of 2021: 104k unique visitors; 2,451 citations) • Assisted in writing and preparation of successful NIH grants • Supervised six students (undergraduate, masters, and doctoral) in a large, dynamic research group • Mentored a high school student whose project was selected as Intel Semifinalist (MIT PRIMES Program), 2013-2014 • Designed the syllabus and programming exercises for a new seminar in personal genomics (6.881), 2012