Christopher Walsh, MD, PhD

Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics Boston Children's Hospital / Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) / Bullard Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics Harvard Medical School

Dr. Walsh is Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and Bullard Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He completed his PhD and MD at The University of Chicago, followed by internship, neurology residency and chief residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He pursued postdoctoral training in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. In 1993 he became Assistant Professor of Neurology at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, becoming the Bullard Professor in 1999. He moved to Boston Children’s Hospital in 2006. He has been an HHMI Investigator since 2002 and directed the Harvard-MIT combined MD-PhD training program from 2003-2007.

Dr. Walsh’s research focuses on the development and function of the human cerebral cortex, and the genetic conditions that disrupt it. His lab has identified more than four dozen pediatric neurological disease genes associated with epilepsy, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorders. Recent work has revealed that clonal somatic mutations—present in some cells but not all cells—are common in normal-appearing tissues, and important contributors to human epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia, and degenerative diseases. This work has shown that each human neuron has hundreds to thousands of mutations relative to the neuron next to it, increasing with age and in disease, and creating a mosaic of genomic diversity.

He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the National Academy of Sciences. He received the UNC-Perl Neuroscience Award in 2018, the Gruber Neuroscience Prize in 2021, and the Kavli Neuroscience Prize in 2022, among other honors. He has served on the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the NIMH, the Multi-Council Working Group on the BRAIN Initiative, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Imagine Institut (Paris), and Advisory Committees to Maze Therapeutics, the Institute for Protein Innovation, the Allen Brain Institute, and the Weizmann Institute, among others.