Stephen Shearer

Chief of Research and Director, The Centre for Applied Genomics

Stephen W. Scherer is Chief of Research and Senior Scientist in Genetics and Genome Biology at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, where he holds the Northbridge Chair in Paediatric Research and directs The Centre for Applied Genomics. At the University of Toronto he is Director of the McLaughlin Centre and a Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, and he was appointed Distinguished University Professor in 2018. He holds an honours BSc in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Waterloo (1987), an MSc in Medical Biophysics (1991) and a PhD in Molecular and Medical Genetics (1995) from the University of Toronto. His research centres on gene copy number and structural variation in the human genome and on the genetic architecture of autism spectrum disorder, and he founded or co-founded the Autism Genome Project, the Database of Genomic Variants, the Canadian Personal Genome Project and the Autism Speaks MSSNG whole-genome sequencing project. He has co-authored more than 690 peer-reviewed publications and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His honours include the Steacie Prize in Natural Sciences (2004), the Premier's Summit Award for Biomedical Research (2008), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013), recognition as a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Physiology or Medicine (2014) and the Killam Prize in Health Sciences (2019).