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.“
Continue reading →Drs.Elizabeth Prom-Wormley and Hermine Maes recently received funding for their Resist! Project (R01 DA054313). The goal of this project is to index individual resistance to psychoactive substance use (SU) during adolescence and use the indices to identify factors influencing resistance into early middle adulthood, with a special focus on potentially modifiable factors.
We will also use a concept mapping approach to identify novel factors and a genetically-informed study design to account for genetic confounding. This project addresses ...
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Mallory is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Integrative Life Sciences – Behavioral & Statistical Genetics program at VIPBG. She works in the lab of Dr. Alexis Edwards, whose research focuses on the genetic aspects of internalizing and substance use disorders. Mallory traces her love of science back to her grade school days in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia, where she attended a science and technology-focused magnet school. She was involved in both psychology ...
Continue reading →The Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics pre- and post-doc awards were announced on December 15, 2022. Annually since 2007, one predoctoral and one postdoctoral trainee are selected to receive the awards. The process requires VIPBG faculty members to first nominate exceptional trainees. The final recipients are selected after a faculty discussion and vote. These awards consist of a certificate of recognition in addition to a $500.00 gift.
This year, the awardees include Mohammad Ahangari, who received the Kenneth ...
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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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Daniel Bustamante, a Ph.D. candidate in VCU Integrative Life Sciences doctoral program with a concentration on Behavioral & Statistical Genetics, was awarded a National Institute of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH/NIDA) F31 grant.
Bustamante is the Principle Investigator studying the risk for developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse disorder (SUD) as a result of traumatic experiences during childhood and early adolescence. The project, titled “Longitudinal neuroimaging and statistical genetics modeling of substance use and trauma-related phenotypes,” will study ...
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Madhur is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics and is pursuing the quantitative genetics concentration. His academic journey so far has taken him all the way from the state of Punjab in India to Oslo, Norway to Richmond, Virginia. He holds a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (M.B.B.S.) degree and a master’s degree in International Social and Health Policy.
Madhur shifted from his career as a clinician ...
Continue reading →The Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics pre- and post-doc awards were announced on December 16, 2021. Annually since 2007, one predoctoral and one postdoctoral trainee are selected to receive the awards. The process requires VIPBG faculty members to first nominate exceptional trainees. The final recipients are selected after a faculty discussion and vote. These awards consist of a certificate of recognition in addition to a $500.00 gift.
This year, the awardees include Terrell Hicks, who received the ...
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The Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics is pleased to invite applications for postdoctoral training with a focus on mental health. The Institute offers a rich interdisciplinary training environment. Institute faculty include leaders in the fields of behavioral and psychiatric genetics and represent a wide range of scientific backgrounds from molecular and statistical genetics to epidemiology, psychology, and psychiatry.
Currently funded research at VIPBG includes molecular-genetic studies of schizophrenia, major depression, anxiety and panic disorders, PTSD, substance use disorders ...
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