Hilary Coon is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Utah. Her work has focused on gene discovery for complex disorders, including 20 years of experience with genetic analyses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Local ASD research has focused on very large, extended, high-risk families with ASD ascertained through the Utah Population Database. Work with these unique families has included development of innovative analytical methods and analyses of sequence data together with extensive quantitative and qualitative phenotypes measured on affected and unaffected family members.

Coon also has a long history of collaborative cross-disciplinary work and innovative research designs integrating phenotypes, molecular data, environmental exposures and familial relationships within and across large research data resources. She is a founding member of the Autism Sequence Consortium, an active member of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and a contributing investigator to the new Utah Science Technology and Research Center for Genetic Discovery. She satisfies an interest in research ethics through long-term membership of her local Institutional Review Board.