Nancy Wexler, PhD, is the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as the President of the Hereditary Disease Foundation. She is involved in public policy, individual counseling, genetic research, and federal health administration, and is best known for her significant scientific contributions to the study of Huntington’s disease.
Since 1979, Dr. Wexler has led a research study in Venezuela on the world’s largest family with Huntington’s disease, developing a pedigree of over 18,000 individuals and collecting more than 4,000 blood samples. This work contributed to the identification of the Huntington’s disease gene at the tip of human chromosome 4. These same blood samples have also been crucial in mapping other disease genes, including those responsible for familial Alzheimer’s disease, kidney cancer, two types of neurofibromatosis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and dwarfism. One notable result of her work was the development of a presymptomatic test that can identify individuals carrying the fatal gene before symptoms appear.
Dr. Wexler received an AB from Radcliffe College in 1967 and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. She has held numerous influential public policy positions, including Chair of the Joint NIH/DOE Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Working Group of the National Center for Human Genome Research, Chair of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), and a member of the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Wexler has also served on the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and on the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health at the NIH.
She has received numerous honors and awards, including honorary doctorates, the inaugural Hermann J. Muller Award for Contributions to Our Understanding of Genes and Society from the University of Indiana Bloomington in 2016, and the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science. Dr. Wexler is a Council Member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences and serves on the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Section on Neuroscience), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a Councilor for the Society for Neuroscience. In 1993, she was honored with the Albert Lasker Public Service Award.