Shawn N. Murphy, M.D., Ph.D. Closed Now

Dr. Shawn N. Murphy, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician–scientist and a globally recognized leader in clinical informatics, biomedical data platforms, and translational research informatics. He is best known as one of the principal architects of i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) and tranSMART, two of the most widely used health data platforms that allow researchers to leverage clinical and genomic data for discovery and precision medicine.

As a Professor of Neurology and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and a practicing neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Dr. Murphy has combined clinical insight with technical innovation to address the challenges of integrating health records, research data, and genomic information.

The i2b2 platform, developed with Zak Kohane and other colleagues, was launched under a major NIH initiative. It provides a scalable infrastructure to query and analyze large volumes of patient data, enabling hospitals and research centers worldwide to conduct phenotype-driven research. Building on this, Dr. Murphy also contributed to tranSMART, an open-source platform that extends i2b2’s capabilities to translational research, linking clinical, genomic, and biomarker data.

Beyond his work in data platforms, Dr. Murphy has published extensively on data integration, patient privacy, and clinical research informatics. His work has been cited in Nature Medicine, JAMIA, and Science Translational Medicine.

He has also been instrumental in advancing informatics education, training clinicians and data scientists in biomedical informatics. At MGH and Harvard, he has served in leadership roles, including Research Director of the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR), one of the earliest large-scale clinical data warehouses in the U.S.

Dr. Murphy’s career embodies the intersection of clinical care, data science, and informatics infrastructure, and his platforms continue to empower global biomedical research communities.