Christopher A. Walsh

Not to be confused with fellow Harvard professor Christopher T 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.His research focuses on genetics of human cortical development and somatic mutations contributions to human brain diseases.

Walsh earned his B.S degree in chemistry from Bucknell University in 1978. He went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he earned his MD (1985) and Ph.D. (1983) in life science in 1988 with Ray Guillery.

Walsh completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1993 with Constance Cepko, and later that year joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as a professor of genetics, where he remains to this day. Walsh has authored more than 350 publications in scholarly journals and trained several graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. In 2018 Walsh was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

• Fox JW, Lamperti ED, Eksioglu YZ, Hong SE, Feng Y, Graham DA, Scheffer IE, Dobyns WB, Hirsch BA, Radtke RA, Berkovic SF, Huttenlocher PR, Walsh CA. Mutations in filamin 1 arrest migration of cerebral cortical neurons in human periventricular heterotopia. Neuron 1998; 21: 1315–1325
• Gleeson JG, Allen KM, Fox JW, Lamperti ED, Berkovic S, Scheffer I, Dobyns WB, Minnerath SR, Ross ME, Walsh, CA. Doublecortin, a brain-specific gene mutated in human X-linked lissencephaly and double cortex syndrome, encodes a putative signaling protein. Cell 1998; 92: 62–73
• Shen J, Gilmore EC, Marshall CA, Haddadin M, Reynolds JJ, Eyaid W, Bodell A, Barry B, Gleason D, Allen K, Ganesh VS, Chang BS, Grix A, Hill RS, Topcu M, Caldecott KW, Barkovich AJ, Walsh CA. Mutations in PNKP cause microcephaly, seizures and defects in DNA repair. Nature Genet 2010; 42: 245–249
• Sheen VL, Ganesh VS, Topcu M, Sebire G, Bodell A, Hill RS, Grant PE, Shugart YY, Imitola J, Khoury SJ, Guerrini R, Walsh CA. Mutations in ARFGEF2 implicate vesicle trafficking in neural progenitor proliferation and migration in the human cerebral cortex. Nature Genet 2004; 36: 69–76
• Poduri A, Evrony GD, Cai X, Elhosary PC, Beroukhim R, Lehtinen MK, Hills LB, Heinzen EL, Hill A, Hill RS, Barry BJ, Bourgeois BF, Riviello JJ, Barkovich AJ, Black PM, Ligon KL, Walsh CA. Somatic activation of AKT3 causes hemispheric developmental brain malformations. Neuron 2012; 74: 41–48