Dr. Peter Kraft

Biography

Peter Kraft is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on the design and analysis of genetic association studies, with a particular emphasis on studies linking variations in germline DNA to cancer risk. Over the past ten years, he has played a key role in multiple international consortia studying the genetics of cancer risk and has been a member of the statistical working group since the inception of the Breast Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3). Currently, he chairs the BPC3 steering committee and has been influential in the design and analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers as part of NCI's Cancer Genetic Markers Susceptibility PanScan projects. Additionally, Kraft chairs the Analytic Working Group of NCI's 'post-GWAS' GAME-ON consortium, which aims to understand the biological mechanisms underlying GWAS-identified cancer risk markers across five cancer sites, including breast and lung cancers. He is the contact principal investigator for the epidemiology project in the breast cancer arm of GAME-ON, focusing on gene-environment interactions and risk prediction. As the primary statistical geneticist for the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study for a decade, he oversees genotype databases and studies involving genome-wide association data from approximately 20,000 subjects. His collaborative work has involved analyses of genetic markers and behaviors associated with complex diseases.

Research Interests