Chris Whelan Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

I lead the Neuroscience Data Science: Discovery & Molecular group - a team of systems biology scientists responsible for building & analyzing large-scale multi-omic datasets to support therapeutic target discovery, biomarker development & biological hypothesis testing for neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric illnesses.

Cambridge, Ma, Us

I led Translational Genetics, a subgroup of five human geneticists, primarily supporting Biogen's Neurodegeneration Research and Development units. Translational Genetics engaged in large-scale research to discover novel biomarkers for neurodegenerative illnesses, investigate the genetic underpinnings of protein concentrations & neuroimaging endpoints, and disentangle the genetic underpinnings of disease progression in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Some of the group's projects included:• The UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP): We led a pre-competitive collaboration involving ten major biopharmaceutical companies, whereby ~3,000 circulating proteins will be analyzed from the blood samples of 53,000 UK citizens • Neurodegeneration genetics and biomarker discovery: We collaborated with several academic KOLs and leverage several key natural history studies, such as the Swedish BioFINDER study and the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, to help identify novel biomarkers of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and investigate genetic influences on core CSF biomarkers• Alzheimer's disease clinical trials sequencing: We conducted genotyping and exome sequencing of Alzheimer's disease clinical trials to help uncover novel insights into the genetics of drug response and cognitive decline.

Cambridge, Ma, Us

Senior Scientist (Senior Manager) in Statistical Genetics in the Translational Biology R&D group. My projects included large-scale investigations of neuroimaging, genetics, and cognitive measures in UK Biobank, pharmacogenomic studies of drug response in Alzheimer's disease clinical trials, identification of blood- and CSF-based biomarkers and pQTLs for neurodegenerative illnesses, and studies of "human knockouts" to assess potential safety signals for therapeutic targets. I also served as Biology Lead for an epilepsy program, combining human data with in-vivo and in-vitro evidence to understand mechanism of action and identify appropriate patient populations for clinical trials recruitment.

New York, New York, Us

Applied Human Geneticist and Scientific Strategy Lead for Neuroscience at the Genome Sciences & Technologies Unit, Pfizer Worldwide Research & Development, Kendall Square, Cambridge MA. I led human genetics and human biology projects to help support drug target identification, drug target validation, and biomarker discovery for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other neuropsychiatric illnesses. I collaborated with several cross-disciplinary teams at Pfizer's Neuroscience research unit, coordinating genome-wide association studies, large-scale plasma/CSF proteomics projects, neuroimaging collaborations, in-vitro functional genomics studies, and in-silico RNA-seq analyses.I served as point-of-contact for all neuroscience genetics projects at Pfizer until the company departed the therapeutic area in 2018.

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Post-doctoral research fellow and program manager for the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium: An international network of neuroscientists, clinicians and statistical geneticists. Working with the overall consortium PI, Professor Paul Thompson, I helped coordinate an NIH-funded scientific portfolio of over 30 international collaborations, leading to several high-impact publications in Nature, Nature Genetics, Molecular Psychiatry, Neuroimage, Brain, and many more.In my initial role as a post-doctoral fellow, I co-founded and led ENIGMA-Epilepsy - an international consortium of epilepsy clinicians, geneticists, and neuroscientists (Whelan et al., Brain, 2018). I also validated an automated FreeSurfer algorithm to automatically extract human hippocampal subfields from brain MRI scans (Whelan et al., NeuroImage, 2016), and contributed to multiple ENIGMA GWAS papers (Hibar et al., Nature 2015, Nature Communications 2017; Adams et al., Nature Neuroscience 2016).

Phd, Neuroscience And Genetics

Msc, Neuroscience

Ba, Psychology