Assistant Clinical Laboratory Director;
Clinical Assistant Professor
Children's Mercy Kansas City;
UMKC School of Medicine
Dr. Lisa Lansdon, PhD, FACMG, is an Assistant Clinical Director of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at Children's Mercy Kansas City and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. Her primary role is performing genomic testing to aid in the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of pediatric oncology patients. She completed her bachelor's degree in Biology and Spanish at Luther College and earned her PhD in Genetics at the University of Iowa. Her thesis work focused on the contribution of copy number variation (CNV) to cleft lip and palate formation, where she identified novel Mendelian clefting loci and investigated their functional impact using Xenopus laevis. She then completed her fellowship in Laboratory Genetics and Genomics at Children's Mercy Kansas City where she explored the clinical utility of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and microarray for the detection of CNVs in cancer. Her current research interests continue to include somatic variant detection using NGS-based technologies and the use of human reference genomes in sequence variant detection and interpretation.