Dr. Scherer holds the GlaxoSmithKline-Canadian Institutes of Health Research Endowed Chair in Genome Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and University of Toronto (U of T) and he is Director of the U of T McLaughlin Centre, as well as The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids. His team contributed to the landmark discovery of global gene copy number variation (CNV) as a common form of genetic variation in human DNA. His group then identified CNV to contribute to the aetiology of autism and many other disorders, and the Database of Genomic Variants he founded facilitates hundreds of thousands of clinical diagnoses each year.

 

Dr. Scherer has won numerous honors such as the Steacie Prize, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholarship, the Killam Prize, and three Honorary degrees. He is a Fellow of CIFAR, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2014, he was selected as a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in Physiology and Medicine for “the discovery of large-scale copy number variation and its association with specific diseases”.