Dr. Jennifer Kalish received her MD and PhD in Genetics from Yale University where she studied the biochemistry of DNA. She completed her residency and fellowship in Pediatrics and Genetics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and post-doctoral training in Epigenetics with Dr. Marisa Bartolomei at the University of Pennsylvania and received a Master’s in Translational Research from Penn. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics and Director of the Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome (BWS) Program of Excellence through the Orphan Disease Center. Dr. Kalish’s clinical work and research focuses on epigenetic and cancer predisposition disorders, most prominently BWS. Dr. Kalish is an international expert in BWS and holds the Lorenzo “Turtle” Sartini Jr Endowed Chair in BWS Research. Dr. Kalish established the BWS Program at CHOP which includes comprehensive care from diagnosis through management for patients and their families. She cares for patients with BWS from all over the world. Dr. Kalish’s work extends into the ultrarare disease space including WAGR syndrome, Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome, and Malan Syndrome. Dr. Kalish also established and oversees the BWS Patient Registry at CHOP and initiated biennial educational conferences for families and health care providers on BWS. She lectures broadly on clinical practice guidelines and using rare diseases as models to understand normal growth and cancer. Dr. Kalish’s translational research program focuses on studying the transition between normal growth, overgrowth, and cancer in the laboratory. She has published numerous clinical and basic science papers on BWS and other rare diseases and her work is funded by numerous childhood cancer foundations and NIH.  She will be presenting her seminar entitled "Cancer lessons from rare disease: The Beckwith-Wiedmann Spectrum Story""