Bio
Helio Costa, PhD, is a medical geneticist with expertise in oncology, medical genetics and genomics, computational biology, data science, software engineering, and product development. He is passionate about leveraging his interdisciplinary skillset to build and develop commercial-grade cancer diagnostic products and medical software that aid in patient care and clinical decision support. Currently he is Medical Director of Oncology at Natera, and an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford Medical School.
Dr. Costa's research focuses on developing and implementing new medical diagnostic genetic tests and software for use in patient care. His research group developed DNA and RNA cancer diagnostic tests currently in use at Stanford Health Care as well as developing clinical algorithms using large-scale clinical laboratory datasets and patient electronic medical records to predict patient outcomes and aid in therapeutic clinical decision support. Additionally, Dr. Costa served as a co-Investigator in the NIH Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Consortium, and led the engineering and product management teams developing FDA-recognized medical software applications used by healthcare providers, researchers, and biotechnology companies to define the clinical relevance of genes and pathogenicity of mutations identified in patients.
Dr. Costa is the founding director of the Stanford Clinical Data Science Fellowship where post-doctoral fellows engage in interdisciplinary clinical research and embed in health care workflows learning, building and deploying real-world health data solutions in the Stanford Health Care system. He is currently an Attending Medical Geneticist for the Molecular Genetic Pathology Laboratory at Stanford Health Care where he previously served as an Assistant Lab Director.
Dr. Costa received his BS in Genetics from University of California at Davis, his PhD in Genetics from Stanford University School of Medicine, and his ABMGG Clinical Molecular Genetics and Genomics fellowship training from Stanford University School of Medicine.
