Christopher A.
Walsh

Christopher Walsh is an American neuroscientist who studies structural and functional disorders of the human brain.

He was born and raised in Cranford, New Jersey, then studied chemistry at Bucknell University in nearby Pennsylvania. He completed a combined MD/PhD training program at the University of Chicago, where he studied the connections between the retina and the brain. Walsh moved to Boston to complete his medical training in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was also a postdoctoral fellow with Connie Cepko in the Harvard Medical School Genetics Department, where he studied cortical development.

Walsh established his own lab at Harvard Medical School in 1993, where he is currently Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology and Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital. Over the past 20 years, he has used human genetics to identify the genes and mechanisms that orchestrate the development of the cerebral cortex, and developed new methods for studying individual brain cells.

In 2002, Walsh was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. His other recent honors and awards include the Gruber Neuroscience Prize, which he received in 2021.