Shashikant Kulkarni, MS (Medicine), PhD, FACMG

Chair, Medical Genome Initiative (2020-current)

Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and Senior Vice President in Baylor Genetics.

Dr. Shashikant Kulkarni is an ABMGG Board-certified medical geneticist who serves as a tenured Professor and Vice Chairman for Research in the department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. He trained at Harvard Medical School, Imperial College at London, UK and at AIIMS, India. In his role as CSO and Sr. VP at Baylor Genetics, Dr. Kulkarni is responsible for all medical and scientific affairs activities, developing strategy, overseeing all aspects of laboratory and ancillary operation and providing executive leadership across multiple functions. He is responsible for building a dedicated test development team that will help translate research findings to novel clinical tests. Previously, Dr. Kulkarni was at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis serving as the Chief Medical director of Clinical Genomics and Molecular Pathology since 2006. He was also a Professor in the departments of Pathology & Immunology, Pediatrics and Genetics. Dr. Kulkarni served on the Scientific Advisory Board of NIH Institute –National Institute of General Medical Science’s Coriell Institute, Bina Technologies, Swift Biosciences, Roche Diagnostics, Cancer Genomics Program at Princess Margaret Hospital-Toronto, Horizon Discovery and Transgenomics.

Dr. Kulkarni is considered an expert and key opinion leader in the field of Clinical Genomics and Next Generation Sequencing technology and he has given numerous invited presentations both nationally and internationally. He is on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals and is the editor-in-chief of Cancer Genetics journal and has co-edited a book “Clinical Genomics-A guide to clinical next-generation sequencing”. Dr. Kulkarni is the program director of the ABMGG accredited Clinical Genomics training program both at Washington University School of Medicine and now at Baylor College of Medicine.