Christopher W. Walker

Christopher W. Walker is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, philanthropist and activist. His interests include modern architecture, urban mobility, the preservation of a natural nightscape in the built up environment, and personalized medical research. He is more popularly known for leading the Dulles Corridor Users Group a non-profit organization located in Northern Virginia into a firestorm of lawsuits against Federal and State transportation authorities over $200 million in past overcharges on the Dulles Toll Road and for advocating the tearing down of the toll roads and future operation as a free public highway. Walker is a part time inventor with several patents to his name. In 2007 he founded Personalquest, an online search engine dedicated to fast search and location of people possessing special qualities that can be specified in a search query format. He has also developed specialised exercise strength and training equipment which incorporates time honored physiological principles in an easy to use format.
Education & Activities
Mr. Walker is a graduate of St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., Yale College (B.A., 1966) and Harvard Law and Business Schools (J.D.,1969, M.B.A., 1971)
Since 1972 Mr. Walker has been active as a commercial real estate developer. He assembled the new headquarters for the Organization of American States in downtown D.C. and developed an office building near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. He then sponsored ten office buildings in the Virginia suburb of Reston, Virginia, in two campus style technology parks that have enjoyed outstanding acceptance by major tenants. He is completing the second park, the largest by area in the Dulles Corridor, with a Wyndham Hotel scheduled to deliver in 2011.
Mr. Walker is founder of the Dulles Corridor Users Group, which advocates for cost effective mobility in the Dulles Corridor, Virginia's most active business area. He is a believer in "corridor analysis" and the implementation of geolocation wireless technology for distributed public transportation and carpooling.
Mr. Walker held teaching positions at Georgetown Law Center in Urban Land Development and belongs to several professional organizations in the field, including the American Dream Coalition.
Lighting, Visibility, and Mobility
Walker is a director of the International Dark-Sky Association . He is chief editor of Visibility by Design, a simplified and common sense guide to outdoor signage and lighting.
Medical Research
Mr. Walker's interest in human individuality found a home at Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine. He has sponsored a CLIA certified lab devoted to application of these technologies to blood cancers where ongoing trials are stratifying patient diagnostics to allow personalized therapy whose effectiveness can be rapidly ascertained ex vivo. The hope is to simulate actual cellular and tissue metabolism ex vivo to allow the test of combination therapies in an accelerated and safe manner. The results of the ex vivo trials should guide actual patient treatment in a scientific manner not herebefore possible. Mr. Walker's efforts have resulted in information resources such as a researcher oriented listserv uniting blood cancer efforts worldwide. As individualized medicine becomes practical, Mr. Walker intends to support searchable databases for individual diseases that will result in algorithmic suggestions to clinicians for more effective treament.
Just as cancers are normally kept under control and break out under circumstances that are yet unknown, many infectious diseases display the same pattern of normal control and abnormal proliferation beyond the body's ability to cope. Tuberculosis is an example of a bacterial infection present in about 1/3 the human population but only active in a small percentage. Collaboration worldwide to understand both the control and the breakdown is the subject of a grant to the Harvard School of Public Health. This grant supports research in neglected tropical infectious diseases. Modern tools to report and improve communication among the worldwide group of researchers and field workers in public health have accelerated the search for a cure for previously neglected diseases. Mr. Walker is proud to support better collaboration between the lab and the field.
International Student Exchange
Mr. Walker's travels have convinced him of the efficacy of exposing teenagers to living in a foreign culture as a way of helping them understand how they can contribute their individual talents to a better world. Accordingly, he has established a fund to send first world students to the third world, and vice versa, for a summer homestay under the auspices of World Learning, a pioneer in the field. The fund is dedicated to his parents, who met on a French homestay in 1939 with the same organization.
Liberty and Prosperity
Walker is a committed libertarian and a long time supporter of the Cato Institute and the Atlas Foundation for Economic Research.
Fitness, Strength and Flexibility
Mr. Walker designed the EXSYS Interactive Trainer, an all-in-one strength and flexibility device. It is computer controlled and generates force through instantaneously changing hydraulics which resulted in a control patent. It is used both for fitness training and post-acute rehab. Over ten years old, it still represents a state of the art combination of design (Frog Design, San Francisco, California) and functionality.

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