Wesley Goar, PhD (Project coordinator)

Nationwide Children's Hospital

Dr. Goar is currently a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital with over 7 years’ experience in the field of computational genetics and bioinformatics. During his PhD program he studied ciliopathies and rare eye disease using Next-Generation sequencing, bioinformatics, and machine learning. He helped develop both the clinical and research exome sequencing pipeline used by the Institute for Vision Research. Using this pipeline, Wes analyzed over 750 exomes of patients with rare eye diseases using a wide variety of the latest genomic tools to identify the cause of patients’ disease. He also analyzed multiple RNA sequencing projects in both human cells and mouse models. During his graduate research he also worked closely with multiple clinicians to develop machine-learning protocols for automation of photo classification for clinical documentation in the Ophthalmology department.

These different projects taken together allowed him to develop a wide array of technical skills that include coding in multiple different languages, system administration and server building, machine-learning, and an incredibly strong knowledge of different Next-Generation sequencing tools and protocols. After his graduate work Wes spent three years at a clinical oncology report company building their sequencing pipelines and the infrastructure needed to store all the data necessary to produce the best clinical report possible. Dr. Goar is intimately familiar with the ACMG and AMP guidelines along with all the databases and tools used within those guidelines. He has a deep understanding of the challenges that researchers and clinicians face when using many different databases with different standards of formatting and annotation in their workflows.