I am a South African American and completed my bachelor in Science, majoring in Genetics, Microbiology and Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

My goal was to help people. In pursuit of this goal, I moved to the USA to pursue my PhD in Biomedical Sciences with a specialty in Human Genetics, which I did at the University of Florida in the laboratory of Dr Margaret Wallace. My dissertation focused on pain genetics.

After I completed graduate school, I completed a post doctoral fellowship and a fellowship in clinical cytogenetics at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital respectively. My post doctoral research focused on learning disabilities in Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) patients and a separate project on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Because of my strong molecular background, I decided to focus on clinical cytogenetics as this is a specialized discipline.

In my professional career, I started at a high volume reference laboratory performing over 75,000 tests per year. After that, I started a lab from concept to clinical practice. This was the first of a handful of labs I have started in my career so far. I have worked performing clinical trial testing as well as starting a laboratory in the pharmaceutical space. Quality is paramount to out field and this is something I keep close to the heart. We affect life decisions and I believe patients deserve the most accurate results.

I pride myself on being on the forefront of technology and incorporating new test paradigms as they become clinically useful.

For more details on my professional career, please see my CV.