Blog Archives

Sarah Lesser Avins

Sarah Lesser Avins is Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer for the New York Genome Center (NYGC). In this role, she is responsible for overseeing the organization’s overall fundraising efforts, donor relations, and external communications. Ms. Lesser Avins brings over 30 years of fundraising and management experience to this position, including serving in several […]

Maria Joanta

Maria serves as the Chief Financial Officer for the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and is responsible for the organization’s overall financial leadership, strategic financial planning and financial operations management. Ms. Joanta is an accomplished leader in the nonprofit industry, with experience in nonprofit finance, research administration, strategic planning, budgeting, compliance, reporting, analytics, and process […]

Charles Gagnon

Charles Gagnon serves as Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the New York Genome Center (NYGC), leading all technology activities and overseeing four departments: Enterprise Computing, Research Computing, Software Engineering, and Data Innovation. He was appointed CIO in June of 2021. In this role, he is responsible for the security and connectivity needs of the Center, the […]

Elizabeth O’Brien

Elizabeth (Betsy) O’Brien joined the New York Genome Center in February 2016, as Vice President and General Counsel. She brings over 25 years of collaborative nonprofit administration and legal advisor experience. Most recently, she was Vice President for Legal and External Affairs at The Wistar Institute, an independent, nonprofit, academic medical research organization affiliated with the […]

Thomas Lehner, PhD, MPH

Thomas Lehner, PhD, MPH, is Scientific Director of Neuropsychiatric Disease Genomics at the New York Genome Center (NYGC). Reporting to NYGC Evnin Family Scientific Director and Chief Executive Officer Tom Maniatis, PhD, Dr. Lehner spearheads the overarching scientific strategy for neuropsychiatric disease genomics research at the Center, which includes expansion of large-scale whole genome autism […]

Soren Germer, PhD

Soren Germer, PhD, leads the sequencing and analytics teams at the New York Genome Center (NYGC), overseeing sequencing production, sequencing analytics, methods development, clinical sequencing and analytics, project management, software engineering, and computational biology. He was appointed to this position in January 2019. Dr. Germer joined NYGC in March of 2012 as a Sequencing Program […]