Stephen Scherer

Professor Stephen Scherer, PhD DSc FRSC is Chief of Research and holds the Northbridge Chair in Paediatric Research at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and University of Toronto. He is also the scientific lead of CGEn, Canada’s National Infrastructure for Genome Sequencing and Informatics. His team contributed to the landmark discovery of global gene copy number variation (CNV) as a common form of genetic variation in human DNA. As part of this discovery he founded the Database of Genomic Variants, which now catalogues >2 million CNVs, and is used to facilitate hundreds of thousands of clinical diagnoses worldwide each year.

His group also contributed to the discovery of CNV of specific genes involved in brain development to contribute to Autism Spectrum Disorder. He has won honors such as the Steacie Prize, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholarship, the Killam Prize, the Debrecen Award for Molecular Medicine, and multiple Honorary degrees. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2014, he was selected as an esteemed Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) Citation Laureate in Physiology and Medicine for “the discovery of large-scale copy number variation and its association with specific diseases.”

Jacob Vorstman

Dr. Jacob Vorstman serves as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the Hospital for Sick Children. He holds the position of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and is the SickKids Psychiatry Associates Chair in Developmental Psychopathology. As a Senior Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute and Director of the Autism Research Unit, his research centers on clarifying the genetic architecture underlying neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders and facilitating the translation of scientific discoveries into practical improvements in mental health care. With his team, he established DAGSY (Developmental Assessment of Genetically Susceptible Youth), a multidisciplinary clinic for children with genetic risk factors related to psychiatric or neurodevelopmental outcomes. Dr. Vorstman’s work prioritizes identifying individual genetic vulnerabilities and early biomarkers and explores digital phenotyping alongside large language models, aiming to advance Precision Child Health initiatives within neurodevelopmental and child psychiatry.