Learner Profile
Suzanna Lindsey-Temple
HMX Course
Suzanna Lindsey-Temple is an advanced pediatric trainee currently completing her subspecialty training in clinical genetics at Sydney Children’s Hospital in Australia. Dr. Lindsey-Temple has a strong background in immunogenetics research and is a research assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. She recently took up the position of genomicist trainee and along with her clinical genetics work this has brought on new challenges. She undertook HMX Genetics as part of her subspecialty training.
What were your initial impressions of the genetics course?
I was very impressed. As an online course, it was flawless. Some online courses can be quite clunky; you hit some roadblocks here and there, and questions are not answered quickly. And yet this course went smoothly. In that regard, I think it was extremely well put together. Especially when you’re completing it from another country, on another side of the world, the last thing you want is to have issues.
What elements of the course did you find most useful?
I think the lectures that are given with drawings that are describing the topic as it progresses, I found these extremely helpful…[Course lead Christine DeGennaro] is very good, she’s very clear, and logical and I did not find her lectures confusing at all.
What parts of the courses did you find most useful or enjoyable?
I think it was really helpful to have the genetic counseling component. I thought that was really important, especially with all the recent and ongoing genetic advances. I did wonder about putting in more scenarios in regards to genetic counseling, because you get a lot of copy-number variations, and sometimes it’s very hard to counsel families as to what it actually means, because we don’t know. I think making it clear that it’s not black and white, we haven’t reached that place, there’s still a lot of grey and it’s a difficult area, would be helpful.
Have you been able to apply what you’ve learned to your work?
I would say definitely yes, because some of the basic components, like meiosis and mitosis, going over all that again, was really helpful. At the moment my position as a genomicist trainee means that I’m doing whole exome sequencing analysis, and so you’re at that end and you forget, well, how did this all happen in the first place? I’ve found that I can now see the process from beginning to end, whereas I was [previously] looking more at just the end, the variant and what that meant.
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