 Vilain left UCLA in 2017 to become the director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Medical Center and the chair of the Department of Genomics and Precision Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.Vilain is an expert on the Disorders of Sex Development and has published widely on the genetic pathways and molecular mechanisms underlying human sexual development.His early research focused on the gene "SRY" and its role in the formation of the testes, as well as how certain mutations could explain diseases such as gonadal dysgenesis.