Chirag Patel’s long-term research goal is to address problems in human health and disease by developing computational and bioinformatics methods to reason over large-scale genomic and environmental information spanning molecules to populations.  Chirag’s interests in computing began as a software engineer at Applied Biosystems, a biotechnology company that manufactured the first genome sequencers and wrote algorithms still in use in the devices today. Realizing that our genomes are just a small bit of the story in human disease after 8 years in the biotechnology industry, Chirag attended graduate school in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. During grad school, Chirag created the first “search engine” to search for environmental exposures associated with disease. Chirag is now starting his own laboratory at the Harvard Center for Biomedical Informatics under early investigator funding from the PhRMA Foundation and the NIH National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences.