Spotlight Interviews

David has over 30 years of experience in traditional cytogenetics and molecular genomic diagnostics. He is currently the Head of the Molecular Cytogenetics Laboratory at Victorian Clinical Genetics Services (VCGS). His research and publications focus on patients with neurodevelopmental disorders and Fragile X syndrome and the diagnostic detection of mosaicism. In 2022, David was the first author of a peer-reviewed published article on syndromic intellectual disability that described saliva as a better tissue diagnostically compared to blood.

Basepaws is a pet genetics company whose goal is to make things easy for pet parents at home and streamline the pre-clinical diagnostic process for veterinarians in the clinic. Their screening tests rely on a painless oral swab sample and provide risk assessments for a variety of different conditions based on the analysis of the pet's genotype and oral microbiome. Having a painless and non-invasive tool, such as the PERFORMAgene^TM DNA collection kit is key to achieving this goal. In addition to the kit quality and reliability, its ability to preserve DNA across a wide range of temperatures and over long periods of time is extremely useful for samples shipped across the U.S. or internationally.