Wallace founded the field of Mitochondrial Medical Genetics. He received his PhD in Microbiology and Human Genetics from Yale in 1975 and his MD from the University of Padua in 2022 in Mitochondrial Medicine. He has held faculty positions at Stanford, Emory, UC Irvine, and currently the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The mitochondria supply the cell’s energy and contain their own DNA, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which codes for key energy genes. In the 1970s, Wallace defined the rules of human mtDNA genetics including demonstrating the maternal inheritance of the human mtDNA. He discovered the first inherited mtDNA diseases; used the accumulation of mtDNA mutations along radiating maternal lineages to reconstruct the origin and ancient migration of women; demonstrated that the accumulation of mtDNA mutations in tissues is the aging clock; linked mitochondrial genetic variation to a wide range of metabolic, degenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders including autism, Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases; and showed that mtDNA variation and mitochondrial dysfunction are critical in infectious disease and cancer. In his studies of the biophysics of the mitochondrion, Wallace discovered that mitochondria communicate with each other and is investigating the potential quantum biology of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. With his mouse models of mitochondrial disease, he is developing metabolic and genetic therapies for both rare and common diseases with a mitochondrial etiology. Wallace is an elected member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the recipient of the 1994 William Allan Award from American Society of Human Genetics, the 2012 Guber Foundation Genetics Prize, and the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in the Life Sciences, among others.