>Dr. Christa Lese Martin, PhD, FACMG, is Chief Scientific Officer at Geisinger, Vice Dean for Research at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, and Professor and founding Director of Geisinger’s Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute. She is a Board-certified clinical genetics laboratory director, who has played a leading role in developing Geisinger as a learning health system, bridging research discoveries and clinical medicine to bring precision health into everyday health care.
Her research focuses on using a “genetics-first” approach to characterize neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders with an ultimate goal of developing precision health-driven treatments to improve patient outcomes. At Geisinger, she is part of the leadership team for the MyCode Community Health Initiative – one of the largest healthcare-based biobanks in the world driving genomic-informed discoveries.
Dr. Martin received her BS degree from Penn State University and her PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Pittsburgh. She did her clinical and research postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago and remained on faculty there as an Assistant Professor and Director of the Clinical Cytogenetics Laboratory in the Department of Human Genetics. Before joining Geisinger, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics at Emory University and Senior Cytogenetics Laboratory Director and Operations Director of Emory Genetics Laboratory. Dr. Martin has been continually funded by the NIH for >25 years and has authored more than 170 publications, including 10 milli-pubs cited more than 1,000 times in the scientific literature.
