Shelly’s first job after graduation in 2004 was at Duke University in the Department of Pediatrics. After having her first son, she took a position at Rex Cancer Center in Raleigh. Her family then moved to Illinois where Shelly had her second son and started a hereditary cancer genetics program at the community hospital where she delivered. She subsequently started another cancer genetics program at a different community hospital in Illinois. During this time, Shelly started consulting with Personalis, Inc. where she learned variant classification and analyzed clinical exome samples. In 2014, she left clinical work to become a full-time laboratory genetic counselor with Personalis. In 2016, Shelly and her family moved to Northern California and she took a job with Color Health working on their cancer, cardiovascular, and pharmacogenomics genetic testing products. A move during the summer of 2020 brought Shelly and her family back to Illinois. This past April she started working at the University of Chicago in the Genetics Services Laboratory where she is sometimes lucky to see her classmate, Sara Halbach, who is a clinical counselor there.
When Shelly is not looking at genetic test results, she is often watching her sons (15 and 13), play lacrosse or walking her elderly but very lovable Bernese Mountain dog, Eiger. Shelly and her husband hope they can retire in Colorado where they married in 1999, but need to get their boys through college first. She can’t wait to see updates from all of her classmates and was super excited to see Stephanie’s update in the prior newsletter ????