Sarah Lawrence College

Institute for Genomics

The technology of trust.

Everyone agrees technology is making medicine less human. We've spent 50 years proving the opposite is possible.

The Institute for Genomics at Sarah Lawrence College is rebuilding trust between patients and providers through a radical reframing of how data informs healthcare decisions.

Upcoming Event

Beyond the Diagnosis, the Story: A Narrative Medicine Workshop

November 1, 2026
Sunday
Close out Breast Cancer Awareness Month with an afternoon of conversation, tea, and writing. Narrative Medicine at Sarah Lawrence College welcomes journalist and author Lizzie Stark for an author talk and writing workshop.
Person with long purple hair, wearing glasses and a black and white shirt, looking at the camera against a dark background.

Mission & Vision

The Mission

Restoring trust between patients and providers through a radical reframing of how data informs healthcare decision-making.

The Legacy 

In 1969, Sarah Lawrence founded the world's first genetic counseling program. It remains the largest. Long before "precision medicine" had a name, genetic counselors established the principle this Institute is built on: health data becomes insight only when a patient and a provider sit down and talk about it. The same result, sitting alone in a chart, changes nothing. Surfaced in dialogue, at the right moment, it changes everything.

The Idea

But dialogue depends on disclosure - a patient willing to share their symptoms, their family history, their lived experience, alongside the flood of new data from genomics, proteomics, the microbiome, wearables, and more. And disclosure depends on trust. Today's system is built to erode exactly that. Inert data can't repair it. People can.

The Vision

As medicine becomes more data-centric and consumer-driven, we are working toward a future where everyone has agency over their health and well-being.

Person in a white coat showing papers to two seated individuals on a couch, with medical items on a table nearby.
A group of people gather around a table, examining a handheld device, with scientific equipment and papers scattered around.

Our Approach - The Credo

Six tenets we won't trade away.

Human dignity is inherent, not earned.

Every person - patient, caregiver, provider, colleague - has worth we don't get to revoke.

People are capable.

Patients, caregivers, and providers carry real insight and responsibility - so we work with them, not around them.

Your data is yours.

A person's health data is theirs to hold, understand, and direct; we're its stewards, never its owners.

Honor the particular. Resist the average.

There is no one-size-fits-all, not everything scales, and some things can't be reduced - so we won't flatten a person into a protocol.

Care attends to suffering. It doesn't promise to erase it.

The work of care is to meet and relieve suffering, not to pretend we can engineer it away.

Meaning before diagnosis.

A person is a story before a chart - strip away the meaning and all that's left is the pathology.

What We Do

Programs & Initiatives

  • Graduate & continuing education
  • Implementation science
  • Consulting services
  • Narrative medicine
  • Citizen developer initiatives
  • Career coaching
  • Communities of practice
  • Caregiver upskilling

For Patients

We help people mine their own lives for the data that matters, and bring their hard-won expertise in their own illness to the table as evidence, not anecdote, so they have real agency over their health.

For Providers & Systems

We use implementation science to make the case - clinical, operational, financial, and societal - for precision-based, person-centered care that systems can actually adopt.

For the Field

We extend a half-century legacy of professional trailblazing into the omics era, training clinicians to practice where data and dialogue meet.

Get In Touch

We look forward to connecting with you!