Introduction
Predoctoral and Postdoctoral trainees at the Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics benefit from a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment that allows them to develop individualized training plans. Given the breadth of training options, creating a comprehensive list of every possible topic and skill a trainee could pursue is not feasible. Instead, we have created this webpage to provide a sample of the flavors of training opportunities available. For simplicity, the training opportunities have been broadly categorized as either phenotype-centered training or methods-centered training. In reality, all trainee plans include a combination of phenotype-centered and methods-centered items. The relative amount of phenotype versus methods-centered training will depend on each individual’s custom training plan.
VIPBG has multiple faculty members who study the etiology of trauma-related disorders, e.g., PTSD. This group is interested in the role of potential genetic influences on PTSD and co-occurring conditions (e.g., substance misuse, depression), given trauma exposure, as well as the mechanisms by which PTSD and these co-occurring conditions may unfold. Cutting edge genetic methods (e.g., Mendelian Randomization, Linkage Disequilibrium Score Regression, genomic SEM, Polygenic Risk Scores) are used to answer questions related to how those who experience potentially traumatic events come to develop these debilitating symptoms. These faculty and their collaborators are also interested in identifying proximal risk factors (e.g., fear conditioning, anxiety sensitivity) that might mediate the association between genetic risk and these phenotypes, and attempts to answer such questions for diverse populations with varying types of trauma history (e.g., Veterans, young adults, children).
The VIPBG receives funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to support both human participants and experimental animal model research activities related to substance use and misuse. Trainees focused in this domain learn about how to conceptualize substance use and misuse traits and behaviors, how substance use can be measured (e.g., self-report questionnaires, medical records), and the impact of measurement strategy on downstream data analysis and interpretation. VIPBG researchers have been at the forefront of estimating the heritability of the use and abuse of alcohol, nicotine & marijuana in adults and adolescents, and have developed methods to study the role of genes and environment in the transition from initiation to progression of substance use. Trainees also have the opportunity to collaborate with members of the 
VIPBG benefits from the active engagement of both the university and VCU medical system in child and adolescent mental health research and treatment through the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, a state-of-the-art medical center. VCU is one of twenty-one data-generating institutions for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study—the largest longitudinal study of adolescent brain development in the nation. The VCU site is one of the four twin-sites, and ascertained over 200 twin pairs through the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry (MATR, matr.vcu.edu), thus supporting the long history of twin research at VIPBG. Phenotypic and genotypic data collected as part of the Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent Behavioral Development (VTSABD) are routinely included in analyses of the Psychiatric Genetic Consortium working groups on psychiatric and substance use disorders. The VTSABD study followed twins from early adolescence into young adulthood with a new assessment planned in middle adulthood. VIPBG researchers regularly collaborate with members of the Virginia Treatment Center for Children (VTCC) and have led several longitudinal research studies, including the Juvenile Anxiety Study (JAS) and the Adolescent and Young Adult Twin Study (AYATS). Trainees have had opportunities to participate in data collection, analysis, archive, and presentation.
Research at the VIPBG is not limited to a specific subset or list of disorders, behaviors, or traits. Few limits exist. VIPBG faculty and trainees have led or participated in research activities related to musicality, stress, exosomes, neurodevelopmental disorders, newborn temperament, intimate partner violence, mindfulness, aging, BMI/weight, developmental disorders and more. Trainees even have the option of partnering with faculty to harmonize older datasets to investigate the latent structure of new and emerging clinical definitions.
Biometrical modeling investigates how genetic and environmental factors contribute to biometrical (i.e., statistical) properties of traits within a population. Examples of these biometrical properties are means, variances, and covariances, including covariances between different traits in the same individual and covariances between different traits in different (related) individuals. This allows the partitioning of individual differences in traits as well as in correlated traits in sources due to genes and environment. Traditionally, twin and family studies composed the vast majority of the study designs used in this research domain; however, the existence of large-scale, population databases like those in Sweden have enabled exciting advances in genetics research, including the development of family genetic risk scores based on extended family pedigrees and modeling a range of research designs involving relatives, including children of twins, extended twin pedigrees, etc., allowing an exploration of the contribution of both genetic and environmental sources of variance and their interaction to the understanding individual differences in traits of interest (Kendler 2021; 
New methods and method expansions are developed each year as part of the effort to accelerate discoveries in psychiatric, statistical, and behavioral genetics research. VIPBG faculty have contributed to many novel developments and method expansions, including the open source R package 