Student Highlight

You can get a personal look inside our student body by learning about individual students, where they are going, and where they have been. 

Meet one of our Clinical Research students, Stuart Scott, PhD, FACMG.

Stuart Scott

Dr. Scott joined our Clinical Research Department first through the Clinical Research Training Program (CRTP), and then through our Master of Science in Clinical Research (MSCR) program.

Dr. Scott earned his PhD in pathology prior to joining the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) as a postdoctoral fellow in clinical laboratory genetics. “My mentor was a hematopathologist,” Dr. Scott explains. “I wanted to pursue something that would enable me to work like him, having a clinical service component, but with a PhD, not an MD, and an independent research lab,” he says. “That’s when I came across the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics training programs and clinical laboratory genetics career path.”  Dr. Scott says he accepted the offer from Mount Sinai given it was easily the best training program in New York City and because it had a genetics department that was so well-respected nationally and internationally. “It was an easy decision. I was also very fortunate that the leadership here throughout my clinical fellowships encouraged research and academic activity, as I always wanted to continue research projects during and after training.”

Dr. Scott became an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and an Assistant Director of the Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory in 2009. Two years later, he received a KL2 Faculty Scholar Award from the ISMMS Conduits Program, which gave him much needed protected time for his research and a formal education in clinical research through CRTP.  Dr. Scott’s KL2 and career development successes prompted his transition to a competitive four year NIH/NIGMS-funded K23 Translational Scholar Career Award in Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine in 2013, and then to our MSCR program.

The training and thorough coursework of our Program have played a critical role in the recent success of Dr. Scott’s translational research in pharmacogenomics.  Since joining the program in 2011, he has published more than 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters, and his research interests now extend to other related fields including cytogenetics and genomics, as well as epigenomics.  His lab utilizes exome and/or genome sequencing to identify variants implicated in antiplatelet response variability, as well as novel pharmacogenomic variant discovery in unique ethnic subpopulations.

“Consistent with my clinical training and research interests, I am an invited member of the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium and have co-authored practice guidelines for pharmacogenetic-guided patient management with warfarin and clopidogrel,“ says Dr. Scott.  “I am a member of several international pharmacogenomic research consortia,” he continues, “as well as a co-investigator of the eMERGE consortium through the ISMMS Institute for Personalized Medicine.” In that role, Dr. Scott explains that he is “working on the clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics through pre-emptive genotyping and next-generation sequencing.”

Some of Dr. Scott’s most notable honors include his receipt of the 2011 William K. Bowes Jr Award in Medical Genetics from Partners HealthCare Center for to Personalized Genetic Medicine (PCPGM) at Harvard Medical School and the 2012 Dr. Harold and Golden Lamport Research Award at ISMMS.