Blake Atwood

Blake Atwood is an ABMGG board certified Clinical Laboratory Geneticist, with four years’ experience working as a laboratory director in Clinical Laboratory Genetics and Genomics. He earned his PhD at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and performed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Huntsman Cancer Institute / University of Utah. His LGG clinical fellowship was performed at Baylor College of Medicine.

Blake Atwood is currently a Clinical Genomics Director at Allele Diagnostics. He is responsible for the review, interpretation, and reporting of clinical test results. In addition to his functions within the clinical laboratory, Dr. Atwood is also responsible for the identification and development of new assays.

Dr. Atwood was the technical laboratory director of clinical genetics at Sanford Medical Genetics Laboratory from 2019-2022. While at S anford he helped develop and validate multiple cytogenetic methodologies including cytogenomic microarray analysis, chromosome analysis, and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for constitutional disorders. Other projects he helped with included molecular cancer testing, NGS screening assays for cancer and cardiac predispositions, and long read sequencing for CYP2D6 as part of a pharmacogenetic panel.

Dr. Atwood earned his PhD at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, where he studied the transcriptional regulation of the human ribosomal RNA genes. He performed his post-doctoral work at the Huntsman Cancer Institute/University of Utah, focusing on the development of new diagnostic tests for liquid biopsies utilizing next generation sequencing. His Laboratory Genetics and Genomics fellowship training was performed at Baylor C ollege of Medicine, where he was also involved with the design of long read sequencing assays. While at Baylor he was part of a multiple cross-institute curation team performing variant curation for eMERGE and ClinGen. He has certification in Laboratory Genetics and Genomics (LGG) from the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG), and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG).

Dr. Atwood has co-authored chapters for several textbooks, multiple scientific articles, and has presented at numerous national scientific conferences. He maintains an assistant professor position at the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine and has been involved with the training of pathology residents, genetic counselors, and students.