Dr. Scherer holds the GlaxoSmithKline-CIHR Endowed Chair in Genome Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto (UofT) and he is Director of the UofT McLaughlin Centre. He has made numerous contributions to medical genetics including mapping sequencing and disease gene studies of human chromosome 7. In 2004, his team co-discovered global gene copy number variation (CNV) and has since shown that CNV is the most abundant type of genetic variation of human DNA.
His group then identified CNV to contribute to the etiology of autism and many other disorders, and the Database of Genomic Variants he founded facilitates hundreds of thousands of clinical diagnoses each year. His work is documented in >300 publications and patents cited more than 20,000 times. Dr. Scherer has won numerous honors such as the 2004 Steacie Prize, an International Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholarship, and the 2008 Premier’s Summit Award for Medical Research.
Title: Cutting-Edge Research and New Understanding in the Genetics of Autism: Does it Inform Clinical Practice?
Date: Thursday, October 25, 2012
Time: 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Session: Physicians‘ Session
Title: Translating Genomic Discoveries to Diagnostics
Date: Friday, October 26, 2012
Time: 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Session: Session #23