Tam is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Medicine in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Director of Clinical Genomic Analysis Research for the UNC Program for Precision Medicine in Health Care (PPMH). He received a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford and an MRes in Bioinformatics at the University of York. Both theses focused on the genomic characterization of the PKD1 gene (associated with polycystic kidney disease) and its homologues. Most recently, Tam completed the ABMGG Laboratory Genetics and Genomics Fellowship at UNC.
Past projects include leading the design and development of the dbVar database of large-scale genomic variants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, as a core team member, establishing the variant analysis workflow for the Stanford Clinical Genomic Service. As a proponent for open-source genomic resources and publicly available data, Tam is also a project-long member of ClinGen.
Long-term career goals and interests are directed toward hereditary disease and increasing the diagnostic yield from next-generation sequencing (NGS), third-generation (long-read) sequencing and complimentary approaches such as RNA sequencing. This includes supporting and harnessing available resources to better classify sequence variants, and involvement with initiatives and research studies to validate algorithms for robustly detecting structural variation.
