Don Conrad, Ph.D. was recruited to OHSU in 2018 as chief of the newly established Division of Genetics at the Primate Center. He is a broadly trained human geneticist with over 15 years of experience in developing statistical and experimental methods for genome analysis. He obtained a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Chicago, studying with Dr. Jonathan Pritchard, and then did three years of post-doctoral training with Dr. Matthew Hurles at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Before joining OHSU, Dr. Conrad was faculty at Washington University in St. Louis where he ran his own research group in the Department of Genetics, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

Dr. Conrad’s early career involved pioneering work in genome-scale analysis of DNA copy number variation (CNV), during which time he played a major role in mapping CNVs for numerous international genetics consortia and published what still stands as the highest resolution array-based map of human copy number variation. As a post-doc at the Sanger Institute he led the first analysis to compare the germline mutation rate among human families using whole genome sequencing.

Dr. Conrad is currently PI on two projects funded by the NIH. The first is to continue development of DeNovoGear, a software package for detecting de novo mutations from families, tissues and single cells, funded by NHGRI. The second is the GEMINI project, an international clinical consortium focusing on the genetics of male infertility, funded by NICHD. To date, GEMINI has exome sequenced about 1,000 cases of male infertility, and is now performing functional follow-up experiments on dozens of potentially novel genetic causes of infertility using animal models. As part of his involvement in GEMINI, Don is devising statistical methods for using large databases of genetic variation to assess the statistical significance of potential causal mutations in n=1 cases of rare disease.

The Conrad lab has a special interest in testis biology and has done work on a) developing methods for multiplex in vivo functional characterization of genes in testicular germ cells using shRNA and CRISPR b) purifying testicular cell populations c) mapping functional elements of germ cells genomes d) characterizing testis pathology using single cell RNA sequencing e) investigating the role of the immune system in regulation of spermatogenesis. Some of this work will be transitioned to non-human primates in order to capitalize on the environment at ONPRC.