Neil Risch



Neil Risch is an American human geneticist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Risch is the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Human Genetics and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. Known for his work on numerous genetic diseases including torsion dystonia, Risch emphasizes the links between population genetics and clinical application, believing that understanding human population history and disease susceptibility go hand in hand.

After mapping torsion dystonia by linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis he found it was genetically dominant and was a founder mutation. Other work has focused on the genetic basis of Parkinson's disease, hemochromatosis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, autism, epilepsy and hypertension.

Awards
Risch is the 2004 recipient of the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics. He has held faculty appointments at Columbia, Yale, and Stanford Universities, and is a graduate of the biomathematics program at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been described as “the statistical geneticist of our time”