Dr. MacRae's lab uses a number of complementary approaches to understand the fundamental mechanisms of disease. In high throughput work in the zebrafish his group explores the interaction between function and form in cardiovascular patterning in health and in a range of disease models. Developing automated high-throughput approaches to model integrated physiology in the zebrafish, has enabled investigation on a genomic scale of a wide range of cardiovascular disorders including; cardiac repolarization, contractile function, hypoxic responses and aging. His group has also undertaken numerous successful screns for supporessors of disease. Parallel work in humans combines classic ‘kin-cohort’ genetic studies with novel phenotyping to resolve the underlying etiologic heterogeneity and allow the identification of major causal genes in subsets of atrial fibrillation, heart failure and atherosclerotic disease. He is the principal investigator of the Apple Health Study and has worked on the integration of digital health and genomics with multiple large technology companies developing systematic approaches at the tech::bio interface to uncover novel human disease mechanisms. He and his collaborators have created rigorous approaches to automating accessible components of biomedicine to combine transformation of care delivery with real world discovery, and to establish a foundation for continuously learning biomedical systems.

Dr MacRae is the Director of One Brave Idea (a biomedical innovation program founded by Verily, the American Heart Association and AstraZeneca), a Principal Faculty Member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In his translational work, he is an active Cardiologist, Internist and Geneticist, he co-directs the Genomic Medicine Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a clinician in the Harvard Undiagnosed Diseases Center.