Director- Clinical Molecular Assay Development
St Jude Children's Research Hospital
Vidya Balagopal earned her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She completed postdoctoral training in genomics at UConn Health and Johns Hopkins University, where she applied next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to identify novel genes involved in tumorigenesis. During this time, she also developed a novel assay, End-seq, for measuring poly(A) tail length. Bringing her expertise in NGS assay development into the clinical realm, Vidya served as a translational research scientist at the University of Chicago before joining St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2021. In her current role as Director of Clinical Molecular Assay Development, she leads a team focused on designing and implementing innovative molecular assays for future clinical applications. Her current research interests include fusion detection, measurable residual disease (MRD), cell-free RNA, and emerging technologies for cancer diagnostics and monitoring.