Molecular Imbalance in Autism and Related Disorders

Prof. Scherer holds the GlaxoSmithKline-Canadian Institutes of Health Research Endowed Chair in Genome Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and University of Toronto (UofT) and he is Director of the UofT McLaughlin Centre, as well as The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids. His group contributed to the discovery of global gene copy number variation (CNV) as a common form of genetic variation in human DNA. They also identified CNV in the aetiology of autism and many other disorders, and the Database of Genomic Variants he founded facilitates hundreds of thousands of clinical diagnoses each year. He has won honors such as the Steacie Prize, an Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholarship, and the Premier’s Summit Award for Medical Research. In 2014, he was selected as a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in the field of Physiology or Medicine for “The discovery of large-scale CNV and its association with specific diseases”.