Jennifer Eccles is the Head of Genetic Counseling at Genomic Prediction Clinical Laboratory. Jennifer has over 20 years of experience in reproductive clinical genetics at institutions like Columbia, Beth Israel Medical Center, and BioReference Laboratories. As a licensed and certified genetic counselor, Jennifer has spent her career discussing genetic testing with individuals and couples at various stages along the path to parenthood. In her current role, Jennifer provides genetic counseling services along with authoring clinical and marketing content. Jennifer’s publication history is focused on the patient-facing aspect of genetics and clinical testing. She is also a fellow graduate of Sarah Lawrence’s Human Genetics program.
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Alka Bahal: Welcome to the ThinkFactory’s Women Roundtable Workplace Edition, where we learn how women think big and grow their business, powered by OGC Solutions. My name is Alka Bahal, a partner with Outside General Counsel Solutions and the chair of our Corporate Immigration Services Group, and I’ll be your host today. I am very pleased to have with me today, Jennifer Eccles, Senior Director and Head of Clinical Genetics at Genomic Prediction Clinical Laboratory.
Jennifer has navigated an unconventional path to reach her current prominent position, which I’m very excited to talk more about. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer.
Jennifer Eccles: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
Alka Bahal: You work in the very fascinating and highly specialized field of PGT testing. Can you explain to our listeners what this is?
Jennifer Eccles: Yes, so PGT stands for pre-implantation genetic testing, and it’s genetic testing that occurs at a very specific time during the IVF process, when individuals and couples are creating embryos and need to do specific testing to learn about the health of their embryo.
Alka Bahal: Fascinating. So it’s gotta be very fast paced, very precise. Now tell us about your role that you play in the company and in sort of the process.
Jennifer Eccles: So I’m a trained genetic counselor and genetic counselors in general, I think of myself sort of like a translator. I translate genetic information into plain English. That’s how I always think of my role in any work that I do.
And so at Genomic Prediction, my role is to really take all of the data that’s curated from all these thousands and thousands of embryos that we get to process every year. And basically turn that information into readable reports for clinicians, for doctors, nurses, patients, to be able to understand the genetic health of their embryo. Part of my role at the company is to specifically counsel patients about the type of genetic testing that they may need or want. Genetic testing sometimes is a need and sometimes is a want.
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