Donald Conrad, Ph.D.

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.