John S. K. Kauwe III

The oldest of seven children, Kauwe was born in Provo, Utah to John Sai Keong Kauwe Jr. and Rhonda Beth King Kauwe. He was raised in Orem, Utah and Hawaii, graduating from Molokaʻi High School (formerly Molokai High and Intermediate School) in Ho’olehua, Hawaii in 1996. He earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology (1999) and master’s degree in population genetics (2003) at BYU. From 1999 to 2001, he served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in the Japan Fukuoka Mission. He received a PhD in evolution, ecology and population biology in 2007 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Alzheimer’s disease genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine in 2008. Kauwe joined the BYU faculty in 2009 and obtained the rank of full professor in 2018.

Kauwe’s professional focus has been primarily studying  Alzheimer’s disease genetics using  a variety of study designs and approaches.  He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the past decade including publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, PNAS, and  PLoS  Genetics. He is a Senior Editor for the journal  Alzheimer’s & Dementia and was a panelist for the 2015 National Institutes of Health Summit on Alzheimer’s disease Research. He currently holds a position on the Scientific Program Committee for the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. He has had continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging since 2012.

His recent work in linking the Utah Population Database and Cache County Studies and developing reliable methods for pedigree identification has led to important findings about the relative risk for Alzheimer’s disease and novel factors for its resilience.

Kauwe served as Chair of the Biology Department at BYU from 2018-2019 and Dean of Graduate Studies at BYU from 2019-2020. Kauwe has been the principal investigator on two multicenter grants from the National Institutes of Health Institute on Aging that have included international and multi-institutional collaborations. In 2014, he served as the scientific lead for the international Alzheimer’s disease Dream Challenge, a computational crowdsourced project to assess the capabilities of predicting cognitive outcomes in Alzheimer’s disease based on high dimensional, publicly available genetic and structural imaging data. Over 3,000 submissions were received and more than 500 scientists worldwide from more than 50 institutions and 10 countries participated in the challenge. This project, an invaluable first-of-its kind contribution, provided a snapshot of both the strengths and limitations in big data analytics of Alzheimer's research.

Since 2013, he has served as the Principal Investigator of Rheumatic Relief, a comprehensive program for public health education, screening, and  genetics research  designed to prevent and reduce suffering caused by rheumatic heart disease in Samoa. The program has also provided training to indigenous medical professionals. As of 2019, the Rheumatic Relief team, which includes over 50 people each year, has screened  more than 20,000 Samoan children for rheumatic heart disease  and published  significant findings from  the first genome-wide association study of rheumatic heart disease susceptibility.

Kauwe married Monica Shana Mortensen in 2003 and they are the parents of five children. Kauwe is a direct descendant of Kaleohano, who was among the first Native Hawaiians baptized into the LDS Church by George Q. Cannon in the early 1850s.

John "Keoni" Sai Keong Kauwe III (born April 10, 1980) has been appointed as the 11th president of Brigham Young University-Hawaii, effective July 1, 2020. Kauwe served previously as chair of the Department of Biology and as dean of Graduate Studies at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. He is a researcher who specializes in the genetics of Alzheimer's disease.