Ying-Chen Claire Hou, PhD

Ying-Chen Claire Hou, PhD, is a director within the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She is an assistant professor-clinical within the Departments of Pathology and Pediatrics at The Ohio State University. Claire received her doctoral degree in Genetics from the University of British Columbia where she performed functional screening tests to understand the crosstalk between apoptosis and autophagy. Claire completed her post-doctoral training at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery institute where she performed genome-wide RNAi screens to understand endoplasmic reticulum stress and delineate its association with neurodegenerative diseases. Claire completed her Laboratory Genomics and Genetics (LGG) fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis where she develops strong interests in cancer cytogenetics and cancer genomics.

Prior to her LGG fellowship, Claire has worked at industry positions where she was involved in the development and validation of various genomic tests, including pharmacogenomics, inherited cancer, and whole genome sequencing. During her industry positions, she was also actively involved in research activities. She published two papers on a precision medicine study that integrated whole-genome sequencing, comprehensive metabolomics, and advanced imaging to understand the value and clinical impact of surveying genome-wide disease-causing genes and variants in presumed healthy adults. She also gave platform presentations for these works at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meetings.