Sulagna C. Saitta, MD, PhD, FACMG is the Chair for the Genetics & Genomics Thread of the DGSOM Human Biology & Disease (HB&D) Curriculum and geneticst in the department of Pediatrics. Dr. Saitta received her BA (Biology) from Johns Hopkins University and her MD and PhD (Biochemistry/Molecular Biology) from Thomas Jefferson University. She completed her Pediatrics internship and residency at the St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children/Temple University, followed by a fellowship in Medical Genetics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. During her fellowship training at Penn, she had the opportunity to work on the Human Genome Project, contributing to the sequencing of chromosome 22q, which was the first chromosome "completed" for the project. After her training, Dr. Saitta stayed on the faculty of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for a decade. Dr. Saitta has served several key administrative clinical and educational positions, including Genetics consultant at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Associate Director for Clinical Genetics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Medical Genetics Institute, and Director of Clinical Genomics for the Center for Personalized Medicine and Co-Director, Genomic Medicine, Neurogenetics and Epilepsy Genetics at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). Dr. Saitta has also served as Course Director for the Subinternship in Clinical Genetics and the Medical Genetics Series of the Pediatrics Residency Program of DGSOM at UCLA. In recognition of her teaching, she received the 2015 Clinical Teaching/Mentorship Award of the UCLA Genomics Fellowship Program.
