Genes In People In Places In Societies and Why It All Matters

Genevieve Wojcik, PhD, MHS is a genetic epidemiologist and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH). She holds a BA (Biology, Cornell University) an MHS (Human Genetics/Genetic Epidemiology, BSPH) and a PhD (Epidemiology, BSPH), and postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Her research focuses on understanding the role of ancestry and environment in genetic risk and developing solutions to address health inequities for diverse and admixed groups. Dr. Wojcik’s research also focuses on conceptualizing race, ethnicity, and genetic ancestry broadly, as she was a co-writer of two recent NASEM reports on population descriptors in genomics (2024) and race, ethnicity, and ancestry in biomedical research (2024). 

Dr. Slavotinek is certified in Clinical Genetics and has worked as a Medical Geneticist at UCSF since 2002, specializing in dysmorphology and clinical genomics. She received her medical degree from the University of Adelaide and her Ph.D from Flinders University whilst studying in Edinburgh at the MRC Human Genetics Unit. She trained in Clinical Genetics in the U.K. and then did a postdoctoral Fellowship and a Genetics Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. She has participated in leadership activities at the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and is currently Chair of the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics. Dr. Slavotinek is a Co-Editor in Chief for the American Journal of Medical Genetics and an author on more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. She is a Principal Investigator for the Program in Prenatal and Pediatric genomic sequencing grant at UCSF that is part of the Clinical Sequencing Evidence Generating Research (CSER) consortium and directs a laboratory that uses next-generation sequencing technologies and zebrafish as an animal model system to study the etiology of developmental eye defects and multiple congenital anomaly syndromes.

Dr. Chris Gunter is the Senior Advisor for Genomics Engagement at the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the head of the Engagement Methods Unit in the Social Behavioral Research Branch. She earned her Ph.D. in human genetics at Emory University and then completed postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve University. Following that, she worked in editorial positions for Human Molecular Genetics, Science, and Nature, and currently has editorial positions at the preprint server bioRxiv and the journal CSHL Molecular Case Studies. Her work has two major foci: scientific studies on autism genetics, and development and measurement of science communication methods.