Douglas C. Wallace

Douglas Cecil Wallace is an American geneticist and evolutionary biologist born November 6, 1946, in Cumberland, Maryland, who holds appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He pioneered study of human mitochondrial DNA as a genetic marker, in 1975 becoming the first to associate a mitochondrial DNA region with a specific genetic disorder, demonstrating that human mitochondrial DNA passes down through the maternal line alone, describing mitochondrial mutations that cause myoclonic epilepsy in 1990, and using mitochondrial DNA variation to reconstruct patterns of ancient human migration. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and the Institute of Medicine in 2009, and received the Passano Award in 2000 and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2012.