Christopher McMaster Bio

Dr. Christopher McMaster, PhD, FCAHS, is the Scientific Director of the Institute of Genetics for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Previously, he was the Head of the Department of Pharmacology, Assistant Dean for Graduate and Post-doctoral Studies, Co-director of the Cheminformatics Drug Discover Lab, and Co-Director of the Genomics in Medicine research group.

Dr. McMaster’s research focuses on using genomics and other ‘omics to identify genes that cause rare diseases which are incorporated into the clinic as diagnostic tests. For neuromuscular rare diseases his research program transitions toward therapies for their amelioration. He was the first to discover many genes of lipid metabolism as well as the variants that cause inherited childhood disease. 

At CIHR, Dr. McMaster has been the architect of several important opportunities including: the pan-Canadian human genome library; setting national guidance for consent for use of human genomes in research; using genomics clinically to determine new and better pathways to accelerate the diagnosis of patients; determining the socioeconomic and psychological impact of families with rare disease children; incorporating Indigenous values into genomics research; a pan-Canadian pediatric rare disease clinical trials and treatment network; incorporating Orphacodes into hospital ICD coding records to enable accurate measures of rare disease mortality, morbidities, and direct and indirect cost to the health system, and; finding pathways to bring gene therapies to first in human clinical trials for genetic disease patients.

He co-founded DeNovaMed Inc in 2012 to bring new antibiotic drugs into the clinic and Haligene Therapeutics Inc. in 2024 to create new gene therapies for inherited childhood diseases.