Genetic Counselor — Senior (Variant Management Conference Lead)

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Summary:

This role leads the clinical interpretation and care-integration layer of a VMC program, ensuring that variant review outputs translate into high-quality, guideline-concordant, and mechanism-aware recommendations for ordering clinicians across pediatrics and specialty clinics (neuro/oncology). The senior genetic counselor owns case triage and evidence standards, oversees deep phenotype and family history refinement, and drives consistent, defensible ACMG/AMP application—balancing semi-automated evidence pipelines with expert judgment for complex, high-impact cases. This role is both clinically and research facing: it sets expectations for rigorous literature integration (basic science, functional data, emerging disease mechanisms such as gain- vs loss-of-function) and ensures the team remains current on evolving classification frameworks and variant-informed care pathways. The senior counselor chairs or co-chairs VMC sessions, mentors and upskills junior counselors toward independence, and coordinates post-conference actions (lab reclassification requests, cascade testing workflows, and longitudinal reanalysis triggers) with measurable turnaround targets. They also shape program governance (documentation standards, reporting language, recontact policies) and partner with IT/data teams to improve tooling, auditability, collaboration, and throughput as volumes scale.

Education & Experience:

• Master’s degree in genetic counseling or genetics from a program accredited by Accreditation Council for Genetic Counseling (ACGC) required

• 5 years of Genetic Counseling experience required

Licensure, Registration, and/or Certification:

• Board Certification American Board of Genetic Counseling required

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Demonstrated strong interpersonal skills

• Comprehensive knowledge of human genetic disorders and defects

• Excellent communication skills to distill complex information, results and diagnoses

• Professionalism and emotional stability to handle difficult cases

• Ability to identify and dissect complex medical problems and make recommendations

About Us:

Cook Children's Health Care System

Cook Children's Health Care System offers a unique approach to caring for children because we are one of the country's leading integrated pediatric health care delivery organizations. Patients benefit from the integrated system because it allows Cook Children's to use all of its resources to treat a patient and allows for easy communication between the various companies by physicians with a focus on caring for children and adolescents.

Cook Children’s is an equal opportunity employer. As such, Cook Children’s offers equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, protected veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected class in accordance with applicable federal laws. These opportunities include terms, conditions and privileges of employment, including but not limited to hiring, job placement, training, compensation, discipline, advancement and termination.