About
My name is Benjamin Kramer. I am a PhD student in Human Genome Sciences at Yale. I graduated cum laude 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.
At Yale, I am rotating in the Lek Lab, working on splice-variant prediction and pediatric skeletal-muscle genomics. Before Yale, I studied disease risk with insurance claims and Swedish registers, modeled frailty from wearable sensors, and built a single-cell atlas of human skin immune cells.
Outside the lab, I am a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery and a Youth Gallery Educator Supervisor at the Yale Peabody Museum. I also mentor with Code Haven and MathCOUNTS, coach Science Olympiad at the Hopkins School, and volunteer with Skype a Scientist, Link New Haven, and Open Labs at Yale. More about my teaching, outreach, and museum work.
My non-academic interests include boxing and chess. I also enjoy reading philosophy, especially Aristotle and Kant, and I have an interest in classical Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire.
Academic experience
- At Yale, in Monkol Lek’s lab, I benchmarked SpliceAI, Pangolin, AlphaGenome, and Evo2 for splice-variant prediction, classified pseudoexon splice products from paired-end amplicon sequencing, and analyzed long-read sequencing of CRISPR-edited patient cells with collaborators at SickKids. I also analyze myonuclei in a two-cohort pediatric skeletal-muscle atlas of single-nucleus RNA and chromatin profiles, and I co-review manuscripts with Monkol Lek for the European Journal of Human Genetics and Disease Models & Mechanisms.
- At Karolinska Institutet in July 2026, I worked with Sarah Bergen, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, and Andrey Rzhetsky to replicate our sibling associations in Swedish registers and compare the results across cohorts.
- At the University of Chicago, I worked with Andrey Rzhetsky and Megan Huisingh-Scheetz on within-family epidemiologic designs, phenome-wide analysis, a care-intensity atlas of 505 diseases, perinatal exposures, and wearable-based frailty modeling.
- At the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard, I worked with Bryan Bryson. I built a cross-disease atlas of human skin immune cells (300,000+ cells), including an 18-state reference of 141,021 myeloid and antigen-presenting cells from 12 datasets spanning 13 skin diseases and healthy skin. I also applied CellTypist to tuberculosis granuloma perturbation data and implemented protein-design workflows with RFdiffusion and ProteinMPNN.
- At the CWRU Department of Physiology and Biophysics, I worked with Drs. Jeffrey Garvin and Agustin Gonzalez-Vicente on the renal system through experiments and bioinformatics, including metabolic-cage studies, tissue microdissection, and analysis of sex differences in kidney gene expression. My first publications and abstracts came from this work.
- At the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, in the STEER Summer Program with Professor Misbath Daouda, I linked MODIS satellite observations over Benin to ground sensors and reference monitors, estimated PM2.5, and compared seasonal and city-level differences. The original visualizations are here.
- In several CWRU departments, I was a teaching assistant and recitation leader for eight courses, several outside my specialization. Giving lectures and recitations for thermodynamics greatly increased my fondness for physics!
Other experience
- At New Sun Road, a startup out of UC Berkeley’s ERG, I spent two summers performing hardware and software QC on the StellarEdge Internet of Things (IoT) controller and contributed to the development of its display-board firmware.
- In summer 2023, I was a volunteer constituent services and data intern at the City of Oakland, in the office of Councilmember Carroll Fife (District 3, West and Downtown Oakland). I built maps and databases of community resources and constituent concerns in Python and analyzed revenue from Measure HH’s sugar-sweetened beverage distribution tax.