Dr. Whelan is an Associate Scientific Director at Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his PhD in Diagnostics and Therapeutics for Human Disease from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2014, where he focused on genome-wide genetic mapping and neuroimaging in epilepsy. From 2014 to 2016, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Keck School of Medicine, USC, Los Angeles, where he founded and led the ENIGMA-Epilepsy consortium. In 2016, Chris moved to industry, joining Pfizer as Manager of Neuroscience Genetics. He moved to Biogen in 2018, where he leads the Translational Genetics group. His team conducts statistical genetics, biomarker discovery, and neuroimaging to accelerate drug development and integrate precision medicine strategies for Alzheimer’s disease, ophthalmology and MS. Chris also co-founded and leads the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project - a consortium of 13 companies generating high-throughput plasma protein measures across 62,000 UKB samples.