Genetic Counselor Spotlight: Becky Milewski
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For Genetic Counselor Awareness Day 2024, we sat down with Becky Milewski, an experienced genetic counselor who joined our team earlier this year.
Becky became interested in genetic counseling during her undergraduate program in biology.
“I just happened to luck into a research study that was working with local genetic counselors in Delaware. It seemed like a perfect fit of science and patient and provider interaction,” she says. “It was a relatively new field at the time, and I liked that, too.”
After completing her graduate program, she continued to work in the clinic from her undergraduate days, counseling hereditary cancer, cardiovascular, and rare disease patients before transitioning to a laboratory environment.
What’s your role at PreventionGenetics?
I work with health care professionals who are ordering genetic testing for their patients. I help them with those difficult questions: What's the best testing method? What are the results? How do we interpret them? Where can we go from here?
What do you enjoy most about being a genetic counselor?
Walking providers through a test result—explaining its significance for their patient, the process that led to it, and additional testing options for the family—has been incredibly rewarding. Knowing that I've helped someone understand this complex information so they can explain it to their patients feels really good at the end of the day.
I’m also really interested in advancing the science of gene curation and variant interpretation. If we can find a new gene that explains a phenotype or symptom in a patient or if we can find a genetic variant that may help a whole community of patients, that has been really exciting. I like that piece of it.
One day is definitely not the same as the next. I’m constantly learning, constantly growing. It's not stagnant. It's great.
What do you wish more people understood about genetic counseling?
I wish that people understood what genetic counseling was in the first place. Events like GC Awareness Day help with that.
And, of course, it’s a little bit trickier now because we are so diverse in our skillsets and our jobs.
In the past, when you thought about genetic counseling, you thought about clinical roles. Now we’re in pharmaceutical companies and genetic testing companies.
We understand there is a patient at the end of a test report or clinical trial. We also understand the science behind it and the logistics behind it. We have such a versatile skillset.
What are you excited about for the future of genetic counseling?
I think the possibilities are endless. We're really starting to see the benefit of genetic counselors in a lot of different settings. As more testing happens, genetic counselors are really needed to interpret these complicated results and help walk patients and health care professionals through all the information.
I’m just excited to see it continue to grow.
At PreventionGenetics, we highly value the expertise that genetic counselors bring to every level of our organization, from lab roles like Becky has to leadership, sales, and more. Their expert knowledge of genetics paired with deeply caring for the people involved makes for truly powerful health care experiences.
Happy Genetic Counselor Awareness Day!