Winter 2025 Updates
- SCGC
- Dec 23, 2025
- 5 min read
Happy Holidays from SCGC!
May you have a wonderful, warm and cozy season. We look forward to returning next year with a full slate of new activities for our members!
Presidents Update:
Once again, a big thank you for another successful SCGC election season! We could not have done it without our wonderful volunteers, members, and leadership. The new board will be initiated next January with our annual board meeting and orientation to kickoff 2026. We are excited to see the torch of leadership handed off from the esteemed Rebecca LeShay Araujo to the acclaimed Lauren Siems Watson.
We are also excited to launch our new merch store. If you love SCGC and want to show it, follow the link to the store here!
Secretary update:
We have completed the transition of our website forum to Groups. As mentioned in a previous email announcement, Groups works very similar to our previous forum. This has been a mostly smooth transition. However, it appears that some subscriptions did not carry over, and some members are not subscribed to the sub-groups associated with the previous sub-forums. Thus, we suggest that our membership check the Groups page on our website to make sure that they are following the sub-groups they would like to be subscribed to.
Please reach out to us if you have any issues or questions about Groups. We hope that you continue to use the Groups page as you have used our website forum in the past.
Upcoming Events:
We are thrilled to express our gratitude to all SCGC members for your invaluable contributions to the success of the SCGC webinar series. For those who claimed CEUs for the 2025 Webinar series, please check your NSGC CEU Portal, as certificates should now be available.
We are excited to announce some dates for the upcoming 2026 Webinar series. Please mark your calendars:
January 28th, 12-1 PM PT: “Beyond the Binary: What’s new in PGT” with Janine Gessner Mash, LCGC
February 4th, 12-1 PM PT: A session with Devin Shuman, MS, LCGC
Details on how to register will follow!
In addition, SCGC's Annual Education Conference (AEC) is planned for Friday May 8th, 2026 in San Diego at the Omni La Costa Hotel. Stay tuned for additional details on registration!
Past Events:
GC Appreciation Day
We had so much to celebrate this year, and there was no better way to acknowledge this than our annual GC Appreciation Day (formally known as GC Awareness Day)! Members from across the region came together to mingle and speed network. It was truly a special night.
DEI Newsletter
Welcome to the DEI corner of our quarterly blog! We are excited to share resources, latest articles, and latest posters/platforms/achievements by our SCGC members. Please reach out to info@socalgc.org if you would like to share any of these with us for our next post (students as well!)
As we wrap up 2025 (the year has flown by so fast!), the holidays are upon us and they bring a great opportunity to spend quality time with family and friends. Specifically within our families, the holidays offer a chance to share family traditions, recipes, and stories that are a natural part of these types of gatherings. However, conversations regarding family health history is not something typically talked about during family gatherings despite the value that this information can provide individuals in terms of preventive and proactive healthcare management.
National Family Health History Day, which has been celebrated since 2004 in the United States during Thanksgiving Day, is an initiative that the U.S. Surgeon General proposed with the intention of encouraging families to discuss their health histories. As genetic counselors, we recognize that family health history is an important tool that we can use to provide patients with an appropriate risk assessment for different health conditions including but not limited to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. With this in mind, we wanted to share some resources that can help facilitate this process for your patients as well as an article that underscores why this is an important topic in our field.
Resources:
My Family Health Portrait - Free online tool created by U.S. Surgeon General to help individuals collect their family health history. It enables the ability to create a digital family pedigree that you can save, update, and share with other family members as well as your healthcare provider.
Genetic Alliance - non-profit organization that offers two booklets, “A Guide to Family Health History” and “A Guide to Genetics in Health”, in both English and Spanish which provide education on why family health history is important and tips on talking to family members. The booklets have many parts that can be customized including personal stories about health, pictures of familiar faces, questions to ask relatives, disease information, local resources, and more.
Interesting Articles:
Palacios, A., Flodman, P., Steinhaus French, K., Smith, M., & Quintero‐Rivera, F. (2025). Ethno‐racial differences in the frequency of cancer reported from family pedigrees in the prenatal genetic counseling setting. Journal of Genetic Counseling, 34(3).
This quantitative, retrospective study investigated whether there are significant differences in reporting of a family history of cancer among different ethno-racial groups in a Southern California prenatal genetics clinic, where the patient population is not referred based on a primary indication related to cancer. The study found that reporting of a family history of cancer was highest among White individuals relative to Latinx, Asian, and Black individuals. Cancer reporting rates in the Asian group (in comparison to the White group) were similar to the rates reported by the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC); however, reporting in the Latinx and Black pedigrees was less than would be expected based on population incidence. This suggests that a family history of cancer in some people of color (POC) may be truncated.
Differences in reporting of a cancer family history within POC may be due to various reasons such as cultural differences in how health information is disclosed among different ethno-racial groups, possible provider bias, and barriers including reduced access to proper health care stemming from structural racism, medical mistrust, and language discordance. The findings from this study highlights the continued need for profound and substantial initiatives within healthcare institutions to address existing structural barriers that contribute to underreporting of cancer in POC. This, together with increasing awareness of the value of family cancer history, can ultimately help reduce some of the cancer health disparities that are prevalent in some of these ethno-racial groups in the United States.
The Fridge
We are always looking for more reasons to celebrate our membership. Submit your or your colleagues’ accomplishments so we can put it on “The Fridge”! Selected submissions will be featured in the next quarterly SCGC blog post.
Send us your reason to celebrate here:
See you all next year!
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