Jennifer Posey, MD, PhD to Join Columbia as Chief of Pediatric Clinical Genetics and CUIMC Chief Genomics Officer

Jennifer Posey MD, PhD, FACMG will join Columbia in February 2025 to serve as chief of the Division of Clinical Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics and as the inaugural chief genomics officer of Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CGO-CUIMC).

Dr. Posey will broaden the reach of the pediatric clinical genetics division (previously led by Dr. Wendy Chung) by establishing a linked service in the Department of Medicine.

As CGO-CUIMC, Dr. Posey will develop a new vision for medical genetics and genomics and coordinate these services with Columbia’s Precision Medicine Initiative, the electronic health record infrastructure, and the clinical genomics laboratories and Genomic Data Infrastructure at CUIMC/NewYork-Presbyterian. In this role she will also link to the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and the VP&S Dean’s office. “Dr. Posey will certainly create many more connections,” says Jordan Orange, MD, PhD, chair of Pediatrics, “and we look forward to her using her talents to help advance the outstanding momentum we have in genomic medicine at Columbia. We are thrilled that she will be returning to the home of her training to advance Columbia’s footprint in genetics.”

Dr. Posey is presently at Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics. She has served as faculty and an attending physician since 2014 following her completion of fellowships in medical genetics and research genetics (with Dr. James Lupski) at Baylor, and residency in medicine at Columbia.  She is a graduate of the University of Texas, Austin and received her MD and PhD degrees at Baylor College of Medicine. She is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the American Society for Human Genetics Early Career Award and the American Society for Clinical Investigation Young Physician-Scientist Award.

Her impact has grown at an inspiring pace as evidenced by her 257 listed Scopus publications and her current role as principal investigator of the NIH Mendelian Genomics Research Center U01 and GREGoR (Genomics Research to Elucidate the Genetics of Rare Diseases) consortium. She is widely recognized for her 2017 New England Journal of Medicine paper, “Resolution of Disease Phenotypes Resulting from Multilocus Genomic Variation,” which opened the door to the next wave of genetic disease explanation and etiology.