Jesse M. Hunter, PhD

Jesse Hunter, PhD, completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biochemistry at Brigham Young University followed by a Ph.D. at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Cell Biology. He completed a Laboratory Genetics and Genomics fellowship at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene in 2020 and recently joined Nationwide Children’s Hospital as a Clinical Laboratory Director in the Institute for Genomic Medicine.

For the past eight years Dr. Hunter has focused on clinical genetic diagnostics and research. Dr. Hunter was employed by Ambry Genetics from 2016 to 2020. While at Ambry Genetics, he analyzed clinical whole exome sequencing (WES) data and performed variant analysis for cardio, cancer, and neurodevelopment next generation sequencing (NGS) panels. He also investigated the distribution of variants across the TTN gene in a large WES cohort. Prior to his work at Ambry Genetics, Dr. Hunter was carried out clinical research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute where he used WES to discover novel disease causing variants in infants and children with undiagnosed neuromuscular disorders. He also focused on the biochemistry of the Ubiquitin-like modifier-activating enzyme 1 (Uba1) and its role in X-linked spinal muscular atrophy. Dr. Hunter’s postdoctoral work was centered on Alzheimer's disease (AD) research. At the Banner Sun Health Research Institute he investigated the role of cerebral blood flow in AD. At Eli Lilly and Company, he studied the role of ApoE4 in AD mouse models and seizures. Over the past 20 years Dr. Hunter has gained a broad range of technical experience and expertise in areas including chromosome analysis, NGS, immunohistochemistry, mouse models of neuromuscular disease, microscopy, MRI analysis, cell culture, and biochemistry.