About
My name is Benjamin Kramer. I am a PhD student in Human Genome Sciences at Yale. I graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics and a minor in Mathematics, and spent a year as a visiting student at the University of Oxford.
My recent work has used large-scale health records, wearable sensors, and single-cell data to test biomedical questions at population and cellular scales.
I am also a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery, a health-resource guide volunteer with Link New Haven, and a member of Open Labs at Yale. I am registered with Skype a Scientist for Fall 2026 and awaiting a classroom match. I will begin work in the Yale Peabody Museum’s entomology collections on September 21, 2026. More about my teaching, outreach, and museum work.
My non-academic interests include boxing and chess. I also enjoy reading philosophy, particularly relating to Aristotelianism and Kant and have an interest in Classical Greece, Rome and the Byzantine Empire.
Recent research experience includes…
- At the University of Chicago, I worked with Andrey Rzhetsky and Megan Huisingh-Scheetz on within-family epidemiologic designs, phenome-wide analysis, and wearable-based frailty modeling.
- At the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard, I worked with Bryan Bryson. I harmonized 141,021 myeloid and antigen-presenting cells from 12 datasets into an 18-state reference spanning 13 skin diseases and healthy skin, applied CellTypist to tuberculosis granuloma perturbation data, and implemented protein-design workflows with RFdiffusion and ProteinMPNN.
- The CWRU Department of Physiology and Biophysics with Drs. Jeffrey Garvin and Agustin Gonzalez-Vicente focusing on the renal system through experiments and bioinformatics. My first publication and abstracts are related to this work.
- The UC Berkeley Department of Public Health during an REU with Professor Misbath Daouda. I analyzed air pollution through satellite data in West Africa, using statistical modelling through Python, with all original visualizations here.
- Different CWRU Departments as a teaching assistant for a few memorable courses, with multiple outside my specialization. Giving lectures recitations for thermodynamics greatly increased my fondness for physics!
Non-academic job experience includes…
- New Sun Road for two summers, a startup out of UC Berkeley’s ERG. I performed hardware/software QC on the StellarEdge Internet of Things (IoT) controller and contributed to light development to the StellarEdge’s display board firmware.
- The City of Oakland, in particular District 4 (West + Downtown Oakland). I created district databases for locations, requests, and solicitations in Python and performed policy analysis on revenue generated by Measure HH’s Sugar Sweetened Beverage Distribution Tax.