Dr. Adam Hansen is an accomplished scientist and entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to relieving human suffering through the advancement of precision medicine. He is the founder and CEO of Geneial, a private exchange for genetic and patient-reported outcomes data. Less than two years after completing his doctoral training, Dr. Hansen and team were awarded a $2.3 million fast-track Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). He also serves as principal investigator and is a co-inventor of three international patent applications (pending).
He earned his Bachelor of Science in bioinformatics from Brigham Young University, with minors in computer science, Chinese and global business and literacy, in 2016. He also studied abroad at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China, where he studied advanced Chinese language and literature. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Molecular & Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in 2020, and he completed a fellowship in digital health at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute in 2021.
During his doctoral training at Baylor’s Human Genome Sequencing Center under renowned geneticist Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., Dr. Hansen developed computational approaches that accelerated the discovery of rare disease genes. Working with exome sequencing data from more than 18,000 individuals, he helped identify 154 candidate Mendelian disease genes and contributed to studies that expanded scientific understanding of several genetic disorders. By the completion of his Ph.D. in 2020, he had assumed leadership roles in research strategy, grant development and trainee mentorship, helping shape a successful NIH consortium proposal and representing the Baylor College of Medicine Centers of Mendelian Genomics consortium group at an NIH/NHGRI annual meeting. He contributed significantly to the training of two postdoctoral associates and five graduate students. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, Dr. Hansen was selected as a Biodesign Fellow at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute, where he combined his expertise in genetics, data science, and healthcare innovation to prepare for his future career as an entrepreneur.
Dr. Hansen’s work sits at the intersection of genomics, data science, and healthcare innovation. He is particularly interested in using advanced computational tools to identify the genetic causes of disease, improve understanding of rare disorders, and accelerate the translation of genomic discoveries into clinical care. As founder and CEO of Geneial, he is focused on harnessing technology to increase the pace of medical discovery while promoting responsible data sharing, patient privacy, and individual ownership of health information.
Dr. Hansen is fluent in Mandarin, and in his free time, he volunteers to teach a weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) course in Sugar Land, Texas. He serves on the industry advisory board for the University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics, and he has been invited to speak on health equity, innovation and the importance of character in leadership.
