Neil Hanchard

Neil Hanchard earned his medical degree with honours from the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, before being awarded the Jamaica Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where he completed a doctorate in clinical medicine and human genetics under Professor Dominic Kwiatkowski, researching population differentiation and natural selection in the human immune system.

After returning to Jamaica to research sickle cell disease and severe childhood malnutrition, Hanchard moved to the United States to complete his pediatric residency at the Mayo Clinic, followed by a fellowship in medical genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he later established his own research laboratory as a tenure-track physician-scientist.

Hanchard's research focuses on the genetics of complex childhood diseases across genetically diverse populations, including sickle cell disease, severe childhood malnutrition, pediatric HIV, and congenital cardiovascular disorders. As chair of the Genome Analysis working group of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium, his team's sequencing work has uncovered millions of previously unreported genetic variants in African populations — genomic diversity that had remained largely unstudied by international genetics research despite Africa holding the deepest and most diverse ancestral genetic lineages of any continent.

In January 2021, Hanchard moved his research programme to the National Institutes of Health as an intramural investigator, where he now leads the Childhood Complex Disease Genomics Section within the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), continuing his work to bring genomic medicine research to historically underrepresented populations.