With an American father and Australian mother, Chris grew up in Washington DC before moving to Sydney as a teenager. He trained in veterinary medicine and surgery, immunochemistry and immunology at the University of Sydney and in DNA technology at Stanford University. After doctoral studies begun at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and performed at Sydney University, he joined the faculty of Stanford University Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1990. There he established the concept of multiple immune tolerance checkpoints, a framework now widely used in cancer treatment with “checkpoint inhibitors”, and revealed the function of key genes in these checkpoints including FAS, CD86, PTPN6/SHP1, and later AIRE.

To pioneer genome-wide analysis of the DNA sequences controlling the immune system, he joined the faculty at the Australian National University in 1997 as Professor and founding Director of the Medical Genome Centre, leading its development into a major national research facility, the Australian Phenomics Facility. That effort revealed critical, entirely unknown functions of fourteen essential genes controlling the immune system, including CARD11, ROQUIN1, HNRNPLL, THEMIS, DOCK8, ATP11C, SPPL2A, ZFP318, GSDMD and ETAA1, as well as four previously obscure genes in neurodegeneration and infertility.