The Willcoxon Innovation in Health Sciences Summit

Dr. Christa Lese Martin, PhD, FACMG, is Chief Scientific Officer at Geisinger, Vice Dean for Research at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, and Professor and founding Director of Geisinger’s Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute. She is a clinician-scientist with Board-certification in clinical laboratory genomics, who has played a leading role in developing Geisinger as a learning health system, bridging research discoveries and clinical medicine to bring precision health into everyday health care.  

Geisinger, a rural healthcare system in Central and Northeast Pennsylvania, was founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger and now serves more than 1 million people across its 10 hospital campuses. The system also includes a health plan with more than half a million members, a research institute, and the Geisinger College of Health Sciences, which includes schools of medicine, nursing and graduate education. With more than 25,000 employees and 1,700+ employed physicians, Geisinger boosts its hometown economies in Pennsylvania by billions of dollars annually.  

Today, Geisinger is home to more than 1400 ongoing clinical research studies, including its flagship MyCode Community Health Initiative, which is the largest healthcare-based biobank linked to electronic health and DNA sequence data. In 2022, Geisinger garnered more than $45 million in external grant funding and published more than 1000 papers. Dr. Martin’s strategic vision embraces a population health-based approach to patient care, guided by genomics, to develop a proactive, rather than reactive approach to medicine to prevent disease, detect it earlier, or treat it better.  

Dr. Martin received her BS degree from Penn State University and her PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Pittsburgh. She did her clinical and research postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago and remained on faculty there as an Assistant Professor and Director of the Clinical Cytogenetics Laboratory in the Department of Human Genetics. Before joining Geisinger, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics at Emory University and Senior Cytogenetics Laboratory Director and Operations Director of Emory Genetics Laboratory. Dr. Martin has been continually funded by the NIH for >25 years and has authored more than 170 publications, including 10 milli-pubs cited more than 1,000 times in the scientific literature.