David Nelson Books

David Nelson (born 1956) is an American human geneticist, currently Associate Director in the Center for Research on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (1995) and Professor in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine BCM since 1999. Since 2018, he has been the director of the doctoral program in cell biology and cancer, and the director of the doctoral program in integrative biomedical and molecular sciences since 2015 at BCM.
Nelson received a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 1978 and received his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. He did his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984–1985) and the National Institutes of Health before moving to Baylor College of Medicine.
Nelson joined David Housman's MIT Center for Cancer Research (CCR) group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow (1986–1989). Nelson's work using introduced selectable genes expanded approaches to mapping the entire human genome. From 1984 to 1985, in an internal program at the National Institutes of Health in the laboratory of Robert Lazzarini, Nelson studied neuroscience and defined genes that code for neurofilament proteins. In 1986 he joined the C. Thomas Caskey laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine.
Using PCR, a technique that allows rapid gene mapping and the isolation of specific chromosomal regions, Nelson et al. identified chromosomal locations of large fragments of the human X chromosome; Nelson contributed to the human, mouse, and fly reference sequences and was co-discoverer of the mutation that causes fragile X syndrome as an expansion of a trinucleotide repeat in the FMR1 gene. Nelson's contributions have led to the description of Lowe syndrome and the identification of FMR2 for FRAXE syndrome.