User:Wikigenome/sandbox/David Ledbetter

{{Infobox scientist
 * name       = David H. Ledbetter
 * image      = david ledbetter geisinger.png
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 * caption    = David Ledbetter at Geisinger Health System in 2017
 * birth_date = {{Birth date and age|mf=yes|1953|07|10}}
 * birth_place = Lakehurst, New Jersey
 * residence  = United States
 * citizenship = United States
 * nationality =
 * fields     = Genome Science, Precision Health, Human Genetics, Cytogenetics, Behavior Genetics, Psychology
 * workplaces = Geisinger Health System  Emory University   University of Chicago  National Institutes of Health  Baylor College of Medicine
 * education  = The University of Texas at Austin
 * alma_mater = Tulane University
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 * known_for  = Genomics
 * influences =
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 * website    =  {{URL|www.geisinger.edu/research/research-and-innovation/find-an-investigator/2017/04/03/14/02/dave-ledbetter}}

David H. Ledbetter is an American scientist who is formally trained in human and medical genetics, with specialty training in clinical cytogenetics and genetic testing. He is Board certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG) in Clinical Cytogenetics and a Founding Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG). Ledbetter is currently Executive Vice President & Chief Scientific Officer at Geisinger Health System. His research has focused on the underlying genetic etiology of childhood developmental disorders, such as intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder, and he is best known for discovering the deletion on chromosome 15q11-q13 that causes Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes (ref) and the deletion on chromosome 17p13 that causes Miller-Dieker syndrome (ref). He is now a leader in precision health to integrate genomics into population-based healthcare. He is the author of more than ****600 publications with >40,500 citations and an h-index of 94. He has won several prestigious awards, including the ***Carter Medal from the British Society for Human Genetics.

Biography
David H. Ledbetter was born in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1953. He graduated from Nathan B. Forrest High School (Jacksonville) in 1971 and received his B.S. in Psychology from Tulane University in 1975. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Psychology/Behavior Genetics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1981. Ledbetter's first faculty position was at Baylor College of Medicine in 1981 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics. At Baylor, he directed the clinical cytogenetics laboratory and rose to the rank of Professor. He left Baylor in 1993 and moved to the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH as Branch Chief of the Diagnostic Development Branch. In 1996, he became the founding Chair and Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Professor of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. He transitioned to Emory University in 2003 where he was the Chief of the Division of Medical Genetics and Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Human Genetics. He joined Geisinger Health System in 2010 as the Chief Scientific Officer and an Executive Vice President.

Research
Ledbetter has focused his research efforts on the development and application of new genomic technologies to discover the etiology of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism, intellectual disability, and schizophrenia. He has led large-scale efforts for data sharing by clinical genetics laboratories, first for whole genome microarrays (the International Standards for Cytogenomic Arrays or ISCA Consortium), and more recently expanding to include both copy number and sequence variants under the NIH-funded Clinical Genome Resource project (ClinGen; http://www.clinicalgenome.org) (NEJM ref). These efforts have been aimed at collecting massive amounts of genomic and phenotypic data from routine clinical testing for knowledge generation to improve patient care. These efforts have already helped lead to important changes in clinical care, such as using chromosomal microarray as the first tier for cytogenetic testing in place of the previous standard, G-banded karyotyping (Miller ref). Ledbetter also leads one of the largest whole exome sequencing studies in the world to date, an extraordinary collaboration between Geisinger Health System and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals aimed at fully integrating genomics into everyday healthcare to prevent and treat human disease.