Director, Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital
Alva Chair in Human Genetics, McGill University

Roderick R. McInnes is the Director of the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital and Professor of Genetics and of Biochemistry at McGill University, Montreal, where he succeeded Charles Scriver as the Alva Chair in Human Genetics. He is also a University Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto where, until recently, he was the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Molecular Medicine and a Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.  

Dr. McInnes received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, and his Ph.D. from McGill, where he trained with Charles Scriver.  Since 2000, he has been the inaugural Scientific Director of the Institute of Genetics of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.  Previously he was the Head of the Program in Developmental Biology at the Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and an International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has made many important contributions to the understanding of the molecular basis of retinal and eye development, and to the identification of genes and processes associated with inherited retinal degenerations. Recently, he and collaborators identified an important protein, Neto1, required for learning and memory, and established that it is possible to correct an inherited learning defect in mice with a drug, a finding with important implications for human learning disability.  He is a coauthor of the 5th, 6th and 7th editions of Thompson and Thompson's Genetics in Medicine, and of the CIHR Guidebook for New Principal Investigators. 

Amongst other honours, Dr. McInnes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.  He was the recipient of the Samuel Rosenthal Award from the Rosenthal Foundation of Cleveland in 2002, and an honourary Doctor of Laws from Dalhousie University in 2007. Dr. McInnes was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2008, and a member of the Order of Canada in 2009.  He is the current President of the American Society of Human Genetics.