Nancy Wexler was born in the United States in 1945. She received a degree in psychology at Radcliffe College in 1967, and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. Wexler's mother, a geneticist, was diagnosed with Huntington's disease. In 1968, her father Dr. Milton Wexler, a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, started the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which introduced Wexler to scientists such as geneticists and molecular biologists.
Starting in 1979, Wexler led a research study in Venezuela of the world's largest family with Huntington's disease, developing a pedigree of over 18,000 individuals and collecting over 4,000 blood samples which helped lead to the identification of the Huntington's disease gene.
Wexler is currently the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, as well as the President of the Hereditary Disease Foundation. She holds or has held numerous public policy positions, including Chair of the Joint NIH/DOE Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Working Group of the National Center for Human Genome Research, Chair of the Human Genome Organization and Member of the Institute of Medicine.
Wexler delivered the Beatty Lecture on October 20, 1994, titled “Huntington's Disease: Member of an Expanding Family of Disorders”.
