Hakon Hakonarson's Biography

Hakon Hakonarson, Director, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia

Associate professor of Pediatrics at The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He’s a physician-scientist and Director of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Applied Genomics (CAG), a high-throughput highly automated genotyping facility founded to identify the genetic causes of complex medical disorders in children, such as autism and cancer, with the objective of developing new therapies. The Center represents a $40 million commitment from CHOP to genotype approximately 100,000 children a research undertaking that has gained nationwide attention, including news features in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time Magazine, Nature and Science. Dr. Hakonarson has an extensive track record in human genetics and has developed an international reputation amongst his peers. He has served previously in several senior posts in the biopharmaceutical industry, including as the director of Inflammatory and Pharmacogenomics Research and the vice president of Clinical Sciences and Development and CSO. Dr. Hakonarson has also been the principal and co-principal investigator on several NIH-sponsored grants, and has published numerous high-impact papers on genomic discoveries and their translations in some of the most prestigious scientific medical journals, including Nature, Nature Genetics and The New England Journal of Medicine. Time Magazine listed Dr. Hakonarson’s autism gene discovery reported in Nature, 2009, among the top 10 medical breakthroughs of that year. With over ten years of experience in pioneering genomics research and genome-wide mapping and association studies, Dr. Hakonarson has intimate knowledge of the complexities of large-scale genomics projects and has put together the necessary infrastructure and workflow processes to unravel these complexities.