Scherer Wins Killam Prize

Scherer will never forget what a fourth-year professor told him when he was applying to graduate school.

“Word for word, he said, ‘You’re terrible, you’re a loser. You’ll never do anything with your life,’” he recalled. A native of Windsor, Ont., Scherer wondered if the professor was trying to motivate him or was simply being a jerk.

Whatever the message, Scherer, now in U of T's department of molecular genetics, has gone on to become one of the top genetic researchers in the world. He is the co-founder and director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children and the director of U of T’s McLaughlin Centre, which seeks to advance genomic medicine through research and education. In 2004, he founded the Database of Genomic Variants, the world’s most-used database for gene copy number variation (CNV) – repeated or deleted copies of entire genes that vary by individual – that helps facilitate thousands of clinical diagnoses around the world every day.

In the early 2000s, Scherer’s team identified the CNV of specific genes involved in brain development that contribute to autism.

Scherer’s initial breakthrough came while mapping chromosome 7 – the location of the cystic fibrosis gene – as a PhD student in the 1990s as part of the Human Genome Project. His findings, published in 2003, contributed to groundbreaking insights in the field of genetics.

“It gave me the ability to look at the genome in a way others hadn’t been able to do before,” said Scherer, whose work has been documented by 500 scientific papers and cited more than 50,000 times.

Scherer equated the discovery of CNV to recent news that researchers photographed a black hole for the first time – namely that he and his team were peering into the unknown.  

“These things called copy number variations were basically parts of the genome hidden from us,” he said.

Yet, for years, his findings were met with resistance. 

“It was about convincing the scientific community that something so prevalent was actually there,” Scherer said. “As you can imagine, there were a lot of scientists who were working in the same field who should have also made the discovery, or who had the data but didn’t make the connection.”

Scherer’s 2004 report made waves and set the tone for an American Society of Human Genetics conference the same year in Toronto.  Scherer recalled one conversation with a student that still stands out: “He said, ’I memorized every piece of data in that table in your paper. It was so critical for the interpretation of my experiments.’” 

Scherer sees the Killam Prize as a way to rally resources around the discovery and expand its application. “We applied it in autism but we’ve seen it in every single disease,” he said.

Ideally, he hopes to be in attendance one day when one of his students wins a prize like the Killam.

“My strategy is to plant a thousand seeds,” he said.  “We have a million things going on here all the time – and my job is to watch, listen and learn.”

Also recognizesd was historian Lynne Viola, one of the world’s leading scholars on Stalinist Russia, who was awarded the prize in the humanities. The Canada Council for the Arts, the country’s public arts funder, awards $100,000 Killam Prizes in five categories each year, including engineering, natural sciences and social sciences. The Killam Trust, which administers the award, also names researchers to a two-year Killam Fellowship that supports outstanding scholars on groundbreaking projects.

Read U of T News for more on Viola's achievements.

Since 2010, U of T faculty have won 13 Killam Prizes, accounting for more than a quarter of those awarded to Canadian researchers. In the past five years, U of T has had winners in all five Killam Prize categories – including double wins in each of engineering, health sciences and humanities.

“The scholarship of Professors Viola and Scherer are changing our understandings of their fields, leading to a healthier and safer world,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation. 

“The University of Toronto congratulates them for this significant award, recognizing their outstanding careers.”