Bruno A. Benitez

Dr. Benitez is an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Movement Disorders at BIDMC and an Associate member of the Broad Institute at MIT-Harvard. He is the Director of the Biorepository of the BIDMC Department of Neurology. Dr. Benitez is a physician-scientist and human geneticist working on integrating human multi-omic approaches with functional validation in patient-derived cellular and pre-clinical mouse models of neurodegenerative diseases. He completed Medical School in 2003 and Human Genetics fellowship in 2007 at the Institute of Genetics of the National University in Colombia. In 2007, Dr. Benitez came to the U.S. for postdoctoral training in Neurogenomics at Washington University in Saint Louis (WUSTL) and Neurobiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Benitez joined the Faculty at the Department of Medicine at WUSTL in 2013 before starting his independent laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry at WUSTL in 2019. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Benitez has co-authored more than fifty (55) peer-reviewed research manuscripts in leading medical journals, including Nature, PNAS, Science Translational Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, and Neuron, among others. His publications have been very influential in neurogenetics, with over 7,000 citations. He participated in the discovery of important genes for AD, PD, and adult-onset lysosomal storage disorder.

Dr. Benitez joined Harvard Medical School and BIDMC in December of 2021; in his laboratory, he uses high-throughput and hypothesis-free "omics" technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics, to generate a highly detailed molecular atlas of biospecimens from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases patients.

Dr. Benitez's long-term goal is to create a framework for uncovering proteins, genes, pathways, and potential biomarkers that will improve our understanding of underlying disease mechanisms, predict disease progression, and improve the design of clinical trials. Dr. Benitez is currently leading the efforts in the Department of Neurology at BIDMC to create a Biorepository with samples from multiple neurological diseases.