Dr. Christopher A. Walsh

A Kavli Prize winner in 2022. Dr. Walsh works on Mutations of brain development. His co-winners were Jean-Lewis Mandel, Harry Orr and Hulda Zoghbi. They discovered the genes that underlie serious brain disorders.

A complete public biography is available here: https://www.kavliprize.org/bio/christopher-a-walsh

Christopher A. Walsh is the Bullard Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Genetics at Children's Hospital Boston, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the former Director of the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD Program. Wikipedia
Affiliation: Harvard University
Research interests: Development, Neuroscience, Genetics

Publications
Synaptic, transcriptional and chromatin genes disrupted in autism
2014 · Nature
Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNPs

His starting point and inspiration was a lecture by Peter Hurtenlacher, a pediatric neurologist, who studied an extended family in which early brain development frequently went awry. Affected members of that family were prone to epilepsy.

The speaker, Dr. Hurtenlacher, had studied four generations of the family and found that the females inherited the disorder called periventricular nodular heterotopia (PVNH) from their mothers. This narrowed the search for the faulty gene to the X chromosome.

Walsh identified the mutant gene responsible for PVNH. To find more of these brain-altering he began studying large families where the parents are genetically related and the children have a greater chance of inheriting two flawed copies of the genes that can jumble brain development.