ASD Researchers at UNC

Director/Program for Precision Medicine in Health Care

Dr. Jonathan Berg is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics and the director of UNC’s Program for Precision Medicine in Health Care.  Dr. Berg is a physician and researcher interested in the development and application of genetic tests in patients and their families.  He is particularly interested in the range of incidental or secondary” findings that are discovered during the course of genome-scale sequencing, including the pre-test counseling and informed consent process, computational analysis required to determine the likely clinical relevance of variants, best practices for return of these findings to patients, and the impact of genomic findings on patients and their families. 

He is co-PI of NIH grants investigating the use of genome-scale sequencing as a diagnostic test in patients with suspected disorders and as a potential screening tool in healthy newborns, and to develop a publicly available database of clinically relevant genes and variants through the “ClinGen” project.  He is also an investigator in the UNC Center for Genomics and Society, which was recently renewed as an NHGRI Center for Excellence in ELSI Research to evaluate the prospect of using genomics to improve the health of adults in the general public.