Dr. Roberson-Nay accepts assistant dean appointment for Graduate Recruitment and Admissions

Dr. Roberson-Nay accepts assistant dean appointment for Graduate Recruitment and Admissions

Roxann Roberson-Nay, Ph.D. has accepted the appointment as assistant dean for Graduate Recruitment and Admissions. In this capacity, Dr. Roberson-Nay will coordinate recruitment efforts for prospective Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Portal students, serve as the chair of the Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Portal Admissions Committee, oversee the first-year curriculum and help identify research mentors for Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Portal students during their first year of study.

While Dr. Roberson-Nay is new this position, she has been on faculty in the Continue reading →

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Featured Student: Dana Lapato

Featured Student: Dana Lapato

By Jessica Bourdon

Dana Lapato is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human Genetics program at VCU with a concentration in quantitative analysis. Her interest in the field started with a love of math at young age that continued throughout her primary education. Over time, however, Ms. Lapato began to feel that math was a bit too abstract and gravitated toward genetics as her preferred subject matter. To her, genetics felt like a lovely marriage of math to ...

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Featured Faculty: Timothy York, Ph.D.

Featured Faculty: Timothy York, Ph.D.

By Jessica Bourdon

Timothy York, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Human and Molecular Genetics and a faculty member of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University. A self-proclaimed “poster child” for VIPBG and the School of Medicine as a whole, Dr. York obtained his Ph.D. in human genetics at VCU followed by postdoctoral positions at the Massey Cancer Center and the Department of Psychiatry before being awarded a faculty position in ...

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Featured Postdoc: Joshua Pritikin, Ph.D.

Featured Postdoc: Joshua Pritikin, Ph.D.

By Jessica Bourdon

Josh Pritikin, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, working with Dr. Michael Neale, Ph.D. His primary research interest and background is in software development. At VIPBG, Dr. Pritikin helps to improve OpenMx. This started when he was a graduate student studying quantitative psychology at the University of Virginia. A current project of his specifically focuses on how to run structural equation ...

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Featured Faculty: Katie Bountress, Ph.D.

Featured Faculty: Katie Bountress, Ph.D.

By Jessica Bourdon

Katie Bountress, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at VCU. Her interests in molecular and behavioral genetics are expanding daily, as her primary discipline is psychology. She recalls learning in a class while a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University that there is not a lot known about the underlying risk factors for peer deviance and substance use. Thus, she taught herself this literature while writing her ...

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Stephen Hawking, who shined a light on black holes, dies at age 76

Stephen Hawking, who shined a light on black holes, dies at age 76

Stephen Hawking, the prodigious British theoretical cosmologist who became an international celebrity, died at his home in Cambridge, U.K., early today, at the age of 76. Hawking, who spent his entire career at the University of Cambridge, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disease with which he was diagnosed in his 20s. The disease confined Hawking to a wheelchair for most of his adult life and eventually rendered him capable of speaking only through a computer-controlled voice synthesizer. ...

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Three new genetic markers associated with risk for depression

Three new genetic markers associated with risk for depression

Five markers have now been linked with the risk of depression, according to research from the VCU Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

After becoming the first to definitively discover genetic markers for major depression, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and collaborators have found more genetic clues to the disease.

A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry details the discovery of three additional genetic risk markers for depression, which builds on the groundbreaking discovery of two genetic risk factors ...

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Featured Postdoc: Meridith Eastman, Ph.D.

Featured Postdoc: Meridith Eastman, Ph.D.

By Jessica Bourdon

Meridith Eastman, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral fellow at Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics working with Dr. Roberson-Nay, Ph.D. Her overall interest is the intersection of biological, psychological, and social influences on adolescent health and wellbeing. Dr. Eastman’s Ph.D. training in public health captured the social component of her interests while her post-doctoral training is fulfilling her biological and psychological interests. VIPBG is the perfect place for her to continue her training, ...

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Featured Student: Sage Hawn

Featured Student: Sage Hawn

By Jessica Bourdon

Sage Hawn is a Ph.D. candidate in the Clinical Psychology program at VCU. Her desire to be a scientist-practitioner dates back to her adolescent years. As a teenager, Ms. Hawn went on several mission trips and subsequently became interested in human behavior and, more specifically, the effects of trauma on human behavior. Wanting to be part of the solution, she majored in psychology as an undergraduate at VCU. By her senior year, Ms. Hawn’s ...

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Major mental illnesses unexpectedly share brain gene activity, raising hope for better diagnostics and therapies

Major mental illnesses unexpectedly share brain gene activity, raising hope for better diagnostics and therapies

Mental illness affects one in six U.S. adults, but scientists’ sense of the underlying biology of most psychiatric disorders remains nebulous. That’s frustrating for physicians treating the diseases, who must also make diagnoses based on symptoms that may only appear sporadically. No laboratory blood test or brain scan can yet distinguish whether someone has depression or bipolar disorder, for example.

Now, however, a large-scale analysis of postmortem brains is revealing distinctive molecular traces in people with mental illness. This week, an ...

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