Genetic Diseases

Joy Tanaka, PhD, specializes in clinical molecular genetics. She is dedicated to integrating excellent clinical care with cutting-edge medical research for patients with rare and undiagnosed disorders, and is focused on pursuing questions at the interface between genetics and human disease with the goal of developing novel therapies and treatments.

Dr. Tanaka received her PhD from Yale University School of Medicine, where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Research Scholar and recipient of the George Robert Pfeiffer Fellowship for Translational Medicine. She completed her clinical fellowship in cytogenetics and clinical molecular genetics at Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Hospital, and is currently associate clinical laboratory director at Rady Children's Hospital Institute for Genomic Medicine in San Diego, California.

Asal Naderi, MD, is an assistant clinical professor of allergy and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Her areas of focus include allergic rhinitis, asthma, chronic sinusitis with nasal polyposis, chronic urticaria, angioedema, food allergy, drug allergy, and primary immunodeficiencies.

She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California Los Angeles and then received her medical degree from Saint Louis University. She completed her internal medicine residency at University of California Irvine, and her fellowship at the University of California Irvine. She has been a principal investigator in clinical trials for asthma as well as chronic sinusitis.

Outside of the office, she enjoys exercising, cooking and spending time with her family and friends.

Jason Chua, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Division of Movement Disorders at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He received his training at the University of Michigan, where he obtained medical and graduate degrees, then completed a residency in neurology and a combined clinical/research fellowship in movement disorders and neurodegeneration.

Dr. Chua’s primary research interests are in neurodegenerative disease, with a special focus on the cellular housekeeping pathway of autophagy and its impact on disease development in diseases such as Parkinson disease. His work has been supported by multiple research training and career development grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the American Academy of Neurology. He is the primary or coauthor of 14 peer-reviewed scientific publications and two peer-reviewed online learning modules from the American Academy of Neurology. He is also a contributing author to The Little Black Book of Neurology by Osama Zaldat, MD and Alan Lerner, MD, and has peer reviewed for the scientific journals Autophagy, eLife, and Neurobiology of Disease.

Alexa Meara, MD, is an assistant professor of immunology and rheumatology at The Ohio State University. She maintains a multidisciplinary vasculitis clinic and supervises a longitudinal registry of lupus nephritis and vasculitis patients. Her clinical research is in improving patient–physician communication. She is involved in the medical school and the Lead-Serve-Inspire (LSI) curriculum and serves on the medical school admissions committee; she also teaches multiple aspects of the Part One curriculum. Her interests in medical-education research include remediation and work with struggling learners.

Dr. Meara received her medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC.  She completed her internal medicine training at East Carolina University (ECU) at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, North Carolina, then spent two more years at ECU, first as chief resident in internal medicine, then as the associate training program director for internal medicine. She pursued further training in rheumatology at The Ohio State University in Columbus, completing a four-year clinical and research fellowship there in 2015.