Dr. Meredith Sanchez Castillo, MD, is a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Center for Rare Childhood Disorders at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Meredith was previously a Helios intern at TGen in 2009 and was subsequently hired by Dr. David Craig as a research associate.
Meredith was one of the first researchers at TGen to perform genotyping of Dr. Vinodh Narayanan’s rare disease patients, worked on projects in collaboration with Phoenix’s Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center (SARRC), and finished off the remaining projects in collaboration with the NIND/ NIMDH Microarray Consortium. Meredith left TGen in 2011, to pursue her dream of becoming a Physician, and attended the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in Mexico for 2.5 years and returned to Arizona to complete her clerkships and pre-internship year.
In December of 2017, Meredith returned to TGen when she was hired as a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Center before going on to her residency. Meredith’s major projects include enrolling and consenting families for studies where Next-Generation sequencing is used in search for diagnosing children with rare childhood disorders, and also a study in search for genetic modifiers of disease severity among children and their parents diagnosed with Tuberous Sclerosis (TS).
Meredith not only has a medical background, but speaks Spanish fluently (including medical and scientific terminology). She has been able to translate medical documents and return genetic testing results to families in their native language. Twenty-five percent of the patients at The Center are Latino/Hispanic and many of these families are Spanish-speaking only.
