Spotlight on...Kelly Ormond

Kelly Ormond, MS, CGC
k-ormond@northwestern.edu

When Kelly Ormond began running in 1997, she could barely get to one mile. Seven years later, Kelly spends most of her free time running marathons and triathlons. “I don’t win the races, or even place, but I do finish them!” she says with pride. She completed a half-ironman triathlon, which requires an athlete to swim 1.5 miles, bike 56 miles, and then run 13 miles, all in about 7 hours. “During a race, I often question whether I’ll make it the whole way,” she admits. “So it feels pretty amazing to cross the finish line.”

This October, Kelly will assume the role of President of the NSGC, and there is every indication that she will be bringing the same level of energy, dedication, and determination to this office as she has to her running career.

Kelly began college at Bucknell in 1988 with plans of being a veterinarian, but she was surprised to find that she enjoyed psychology as much as biology, and decided to pursue a double major. When an older sorority sister introduced her to the field of genetic counseling her sophomore year, she knew it was a good fit for her. Kelly earned her Master’s degree in Genetic Counseling from Northwestern University in 1994 and became a certified genetic counselor in 1996.

During the first several years of her career, Kelly provided prenatal, pediatric and adult genetic counseling at the University of Vermont. She also served as coordinator of the Vermont Pregnancy Risk Information Service and helped found a new multidisciplinary Marfan syndrome clinic. “I loved working with the patients and families in all of these venues,” she says, “helping them think through an issue and arriving at the decision that was right for them.”

It’s a love she has had to put on hold for a while, as her career has advanced and propelled her to the Directorship of the Graduate Program in Genetic Counseling at Northwestern University. “You can’t do everything well,” she notes, “and so I had to pick between the clinic and training. I miss working with the patients, and a lot of the teaching I do is case-based, which makes me think about the clinic and miss it even more.”

But Kelly also loves to teach, and finds it to be the most challenging thing she has yet encountered. “Teaching makes you figure out what you believe and why you believe it. I learn more by teaching than anything else I have ever done.”

One of her favorite subjects to teach is ethics, and it’s a subject she teaches to both physicians in training and genetic counseling students. “My goal in these classes is to get the students to question the question: not just to take things at face value, but to try to figure out why people have different views.”

Her interest in ethics is evident in much of the research she has published, and stems from a one-year fellowship she completed at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics in 2001. During the fellowship she served as part of a multidisciplinary team that would be called in to consult on patient issues, such as discontinuing life support. She found it was a role that felt very comfortable to a genetic counselor: interviewing the patient, their family, doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators, with a goal of putting the issue in context and helping all of the parties reach a consensus.

That fellowship was also Kelly’s first intimate exposure to several other medical subspecialty areas, and a key opportunity to work as a member of a multidisciplinary team. It’s an experience that she strongly feels other genetic counselors should have as they strive to define their own role in an evolving medical system. “We haven’t had to do this before,” she notes. “But as our field grows, we need to start collaborating more with other clinical specialists. That’s how you get respect and how you get patients.”

Two of Kelly’s top priorities during her tenure as NSGC President will be to continue to work toward achieving the goals in the organization’s strategic plan, and to build a strong infrastructure for the new NSGC Foundation, which will be established this fall. “I feel very fortunate succeeding Dawn [Allain] as President, because the two of us have very similar views of the direction in which the NSGC should be going,” notes Kelly. “This is especially important because each President serves only a one-year term—with that frequent a turnover, it can be easy to lose momentum.”

Kelly also plans to call on the full NSGC membership to apply their various talents toward strengthening and enriching the organization. An important piece of this will be the implementation of new mentorship programs. “The majority of our membership has been in the field for less than 5 years,” she notes. “I want to put mechanisms in place to help this new generation become leaders, without losing sight of the tremendous advances we have already made in this field. If you’re forgetting your history, you lose track of your mistakes and what you learned from them.

“It’s a bit of a juggling act,” she admits. “We have to be both flexible for the future and grounded in our past.”

Any takers on a bet that Kelly Ormond can’t learn how to juggle?