Dr. Pastinen has been the Director of the Genomic Medicine Center (GMC) at Children’s Mercy Kansas City (CMKC) since 2017. He completed his MD PhD in human genetics under supervision of Dr. Leena Peltonen (U of Helsinki, Finland) and post-doctoral training with Dr. Tom Hudson (McGill University). He held the Canada Research Chair from 2007 to 2017 and was tenured professor in the Department of Human Genetics at McGill prior to accepting the current role at CMKC.  His scholarly record spans over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including papers in top-tier journals Cell and Nature Genetics. Prior to joining Children’s Mercy, he also led the epigenome mapping center at McGill as part of the International Human Epigenome Consortium. Since 2019 Dr. Pastinen is leading Genomic Answers for Kids, a foundational initiative for future genomic research at Children’s Mercy Research Institute that aims to develop better tools to learn from 30,000 children with rare genetic conditions and disseminate this data resource to accelerate rare disease research globally.