Dr. Joannella Morales joined the Division of Genomic Medicine as a Program Director in January 2021. She is a Project Scientist for the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen), a consortium of more than 1,400 individuals from 35 countries that aims to define the clinical relevance of genes and variants for use in precision medicine and research. Her portfolio will also include investigator-initiated grants and the development of initiatives focused on “omics of disease.” Dr. Morales is interested in the role of human genetic variation in health and disease and in leveraging genomic findings to improve medical care.
Prior to joining the NHGRI, Dr. Morales served as a Project Manager at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, UK where she focused on the development of standardized tools for consistent clinical annotation and reporting of genomic variants. At EMBL-EBI, she worked on the Matched Annotation from the NCBI and EMBL-EBI (MANE) project within the Ensembl team and as a Senior Scientific Curator for the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog. Prior to that, Dr. Morales served as a Team Leader at the US Department of State, having first joined the Department as a AAAS Science and Diplomacy Fellow in 2003.
Dr. Morales earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, where she studied Fragile X Syndrome. She received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico.
