Nilanjan Chatterjee

Nilanjan Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, holding appointments in the Department of Biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Department of Oncology at the School of Medicine. His research program spans statistical genetics, cancer epidemiology, and precision medicine, with a focus on developing quantitative methods for analyzing large-scale biomedical data to identify risk factors, understand disease mechanisms, and develop risk-stratified approaches to disease prevention.

Dr. Chatterjee earned his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1999 and his MS from the Indian Statistical Institute in 1995. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he spent 16 years at the National Cancer Institute, where he led the Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics from 2008-2015.

His research interests center on statistical genetics and genomics, with particular emphasis on polygenic risk scores, gene-environment interactions, and risk prediction modeling. Dr. Chatterjee has pioneered methods for analyzing genome-wide association studies, developing approaches for building predictive models that integrate genetic and non-genetic risk factors. His work has significantly advanced understanding of the genetic architecture of cancers and the potential for genetic risk stratification in precision prevention. He leads a research program that develops and applies quantitative methods for design and analysis of modern large-scale biomedical studies, with the goal of translating genetic discoveries into clinical applications for disease prevention.

Analysis of Dr. Chatterjee's recent publications reveals a strong focus on polygenic risk scores across diverse populations, proteomic biomarker discovery, and methodological advances in genomic data analysis. His research increasingly emphasizes health equity through improved representation in genetic studies and development of methods that work across diverse ancestries. There's also a growing emphasis on practical implementation of risk prediction models in clinical settings, particularly for cancer screening and prevention.

• Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2008)
• Mortimer Spiegelman Award for 2010 from the American Public Health Association
• "Estimating effect size distribution from genome-wide association studies" featured as leading edge article by Cell (2010)
• George W. Snedecor Award for 2011 from COPSS
• Presidents' Award for 2011 from COPSS
• Kwan Chao-Chih Distinguished Lecturer, Chinese Academy of Science (2012)
• Elected member of the American Epidemiologic Society (2012)
• Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lecturer, Harvard School of Public Health (2013)

Dr. Chatterjee actively mentors PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, with recent successes including Martina Fu and Ruzhang Zhao who recently defended their dissertations, and postdoc Ziqiao Wang who received a NIH K99/R00 award. His research is supported by multiple NIH grants, including recent RO1 awards for developing interpretable transfer learning methods and creating breast cancer risk prediction tools for Indian populations in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology and Tata Memorial Cancer Center. His lab continues to be highly productive, with over 447 research outputs spanning methodological advances in statistical genetics and their application to cancer epidemiology.