Marc Kealhofer, Graduate Student at the Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, is a Poster Presentation Finalists in the 2023 Early Career Investigator Program Award from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics for his abstract “Dissecting the Relationship Between Major Depressive Disorder and Cognition Using Genetics.“
Continue reading →Severine Lannoy, PhD, receives the 2023 Early Career Investigator Program Award from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics as a post-doctoral researcher for her abstract “The Roles of Aggregate Genetic Liability and Early Adversity in Risk for Suicidal Thought and Behavior.“
Continue reading →Mallory Stephenson, Graduate Student at the Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, is a Poster Presentation Finalists at the IASR/AFSP 2023 International Summit on Suicide Research for her abstract “Clarifying the Relationship Between Painful and Provocative Events and Risk for Suicide Attempt in a Swedish National Sample.“
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Kenneth Kendler, M.D., doesn’t love attention — he says he finds it “a little embarrassing.” But as a world-renowned researcher from his pioneering studies in psychiatric genetics, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor has continued to rake in the accolades throughout his decades-long career. The latest speaks to his legacy.
Kendler has long been among the top five most-cited researchers in the field, and in September 2023, he achieved the No. 1 lifetime ranking from ScholarGPS, which analyzes researchers and their publications ...
Continue reading →Madhurbain Singh, from the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, received The 2nd Rising Star Award at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association for his oral presentation “Harnessing the Genetic Diversity in the UK Biobank to Enhance Genomic Discovery.“
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Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a severe, clinically heterogeneous psychiatric disorder with a population prevalence of ~1% [1]. Twin, family, and adoption studies consistently show a strong genetic component, with heritability estimates of around 0.75–0.80 [2,3,4,5,6], and family history (FH) remains the strongest risk factor for developing SCZ [7]. Despite high heritability, ~2/3 of SCZ cases report no FH of psychotic illness, and most subjects with a positive FH (FH+) report only a single affected relative [8, 9], concordant with the rates ...
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In the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a large number of common genetic risk variants associated with complex human phenotypes (Visscher et al., 2017). Many genetic variants identified by GWAS exhibit varying degrees of genetic pleiotropy (Solovieff et al., 2013), and investigating the nature of these shared genetic risks is important for improving our understanding of the etiology and underlying genetic architecture of complex human disorders. A widely used method for assessing the genetic relationship between two ...
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Dr. Jan-Willem Romeijn, Ph.D. visited Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in late August 2017 from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His broad area of study is the philosophy of science, specifically focusing on probability theory and the scientific method. Dr. Romeijn emphasizes the need for researchers to approach questions from a fundamental perspective. Thus, a key fundamental question for him is whether or not research methods are correct, with a ...
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Michael Neale, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine, received the Distinguished Scholarship Award. He has dedicated his research to making connections between how genetic, environmental and behavioral factors interact and contribute to illnesses such as substance abuse and psychiatric disorders.
Michael Neale created an open-source computer program widely used by researchers in modeling data to determine whether genetic variants are linked to outcome variables. The program has been ...
Continue reading →Alexis Edwards, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. She has always been interested in behavior and completed her Ph.D. in Genetics, working with model systems of aggression. However, she then realized she could translate her work to human behavior. Therefore, her professional and personal passion for understanding the genetic and environmental influences on psychiatric illness led her to pursue her postdoctoral training at the Virginia Institute for ...
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