Founder and President
Steve S. Sommer, MD, PhD, FACMG
Dr. Sommer is a professor of genetics and founding member of the American College of Medical Genetics. Research and clinical preventive genetics have been the underlying focus of his research for two decades. He has more than 300 scientific publications. He has developed more than 30 methods and reagents and holds multiple patents. Dr. Sommer's honors include: election to the prestigious American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the American Association of Physicians (AAP).
Dr. Sommer was Medical Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, performing research in yeast molecular genetics and receiving residency training in Pathology and fellowship training in Clinical Genetics. He is a Founding Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics in Clinical Genetics and in Clinical Molecular Genetics. As Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Mayo Clinic, he developed a suite of early PCR-based methods including GAWTS (Genomic Amplification with Transcript Sequencing), the first workable PCR-based method for performing direct human genomic sequencing, and co-developed allele-specific amplification. He applied those methods to i) the analysis of spontaneous human mutagenesis and its relation to cancer and genetic disease and ii) search for genes & predisposing to neuropsychiatric disease, especially schizophrenia and autism as these divergent biological questions were both limited by the ability to retrieve appropriate information from nucleic acids. He moved to City of Hope in 1996, were he became Chair of the research Department of Molecular Genetics and the clinical Department of Molecular Diagnosis. From 1997 to 2006, he led the Clinical Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory (CMDL), which became one of the largest academic DNA diagnostic reference laboratories in the U.S. Dr. Sommer received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Rockefeller University and his M.D. from Cornell Medical School.