Wendy Drain is a California State licensed, ABGC certified genetic counselor and has been continuously working in clinical practice since graduation in 1997. She has been integral in the development of KGI’s MSGC program, as she is Adjunct Faculty, teaching core curriculum (Genetic Disease Mechanisms and Medical Genetics), provides mentorship to KGI MSGC leadership, and is heavily involved in the admissions process.
She started her career working at the Genetics Center in Orange, CA where she saw a great variety of patients including prenatal and pediatric genetics. Drain was integrally involved in the craniofacial team and the muscular dystrophy clinic through the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Genetics Center served as a clinical training site for the California State University, Northridge genetic counseling program, and she served as clinical supervisor for multiple genetic counseling students.
She spent the next five years of her career working for Genesis Laboratories, a small cytogenetics laboratory in Riverside, CA. In this position, she continued clinical work in prenatal genetics at a variety of different hospitals and clinics where she was often the sole genetics provider. In this setting, she was able to provide numerous educational presentations on various topics in genetics to physicians, medical students, residents, and other health care providers. Additionally, Drain coordinated all the multidisciplinary prenatal diagnosis center meetings. In addition to prenatal genetic counseling, she also supported weekly pediatric genetics clinic.
For the last 13 years, she has been working at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California. She started this position as a genetic counselor working primarily in prenatal and pediatric genetics and after a few years, was promoted to Genetic Counseling Supervisor/Manager. While she continues a strong clinical practice, 50 percent of her time is spent on administrative activities, supervising six genetic counselors, multiple medical assistants, and additional support staff.
To ensure that the genetic counselors under her supervision remain up-to-date on new topics in genetics, she developed a monthly meeting for collaboration and education and works closely with other medical specialty departments to coordinate comprehensive care of patients which includes developing improved workflows and educating non-genetic specialists on new topics in medical genetics.