Jordan Smoller | |
---|---|
Born | Jordan Wassertheil Smoller October 13, 1961 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Harvard University Harvard Medical School Harvard School of Public Health |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychiatric genetics |
Institutions | Harvard Medical School Harvard School of Public Health Massachusetts General Hospital |
Thesis | Genetic determinants of panic and phobic anxiety disorders (2001) |
Jordan Wassertheil Smoller (born October 13, 1961) [1] is an American psychiatric geneticist. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also serves as Trustees Endowed Chair in Psychiatric Neuroscience and Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. His other positions include being an associate member of the Broad Institute, vice president of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, [2] and co-chair of the Cross Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. [3] His laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, a division of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, aims to determine the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders in both children and adults. [4] In 2013, he was the lead author of a study examining genetic loci associated with an increased risk of five psychiatric disorders. [5] [6] [7] Smoller is the son of Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller. [8]
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institute is independently governed and supported as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization under the name Broad Institute Inc., and it partners with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the five Harvard teaching hospitals.
Psychiatric epidemiology is a field which studies the causes (etiology) of mental disorders in society, as well as conceptualization and prevalence of mental illness. It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events, as well as genetic exposures. Increasingly neuroscientific techniques like MRI are used to explore the mechanisms behind how exposures to risk factors may impact psychological problems and explore the neuroanatomical substrate underlying psychiatric disorders.
Psychiatric genetics is a subfield of behavioral neurogenetics and behavioral genetics which studies the role of genetics in the development of mental disorders. The basic principle behind psychiatric genetics is that genetic polymorphisms are part of the causation of psychiatric disorders.
The Collaborative Studies on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) is an eleven-center research project in the United States designed to understand the genetic basis of alcoholism. Research is conducted at University of Connecticut, Indiana University, University of Iowa, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California at San Diego, Rutgers University, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Virginia Commonwealth University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Howard University.
The Center for Applied Genomics is a research center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that focuses on genomics research and the utilization of basic research findings in the development of new medical treatments.
Cathryn Lewis is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at King's College London. She is Head of Department at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
Sir Michael John Owen FRCPsych FMedSci FLSW is a Welsh research scientist in the area of psychiatry, currently the head of the Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University.
Pamela Sklar was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She was Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetic and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was also chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Sklar is known for her large-scale gene discovery studies in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and for making some of the first statistically meaningful gene identifications in both mental illnesses.
Daniel H. Geschwind is an American physician-scientist whose laboratory has made pioneering discoveries in the biology of brain disorders and the genetic and genomic analyses of the nervous system.
The Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is a multi-disciplinary biomedical research program located in Cambridge, Massachusetts that studies the biological basis of psychiatric disease.
Wendy K. Chung is an American clinical and molecular geneticist and physician. She is the Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of 700 peer-reviewed articles and 75 chapters and has won several awards as a physician, researcher, and professor. Chung helped to initiate a new form of newborn screening for spinal muscular atrophy which is used nationally and was among the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case which banned gene patenting.
Sekar Kathiresan is chief executive officer and co-founder of Verve Therapeutics. Verve is pioneering a new approach to the care of cardiovascular disease by developing single-course gene-editing therapies that safely and durably lower plasma LDL cholesterol in order to treat atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
Patrick F. Sullivan FRANZCP is an American psychiatric geneticist. He is the Yeargen Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is also the director of the Center for Psychiatric Genomics and the lead principal investigator of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. He is also a professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. His research focuses on the genetics of schizophrenia, major depressive disorders such as post-partum depression, eating disorders, and autism.
Benjamin Michael Neale is a statistical geneticist with a specialty in psychiatric genetics. He is an institute member at the Broad Institute as well as an associate professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. Neale specializes in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). He was responsible for the data analysis of the first GWAS on attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder, and he developed new analysis software such as PLINK, which allows for whole-genome data to be analyzed for specific gene markers. Related to his work on GWAS, Neale is the lead of the ADHD psychiatric genetics and also a member of the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium analysis committee.
Ming Tso Tsuang is an American psychiatrist and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. He is considered a pioneering researcher in the genetic epidemiology of schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders. Tsuang has authored and co-authored more than 600 publications and serves as founding and senior editor of the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B.
John N. Constantino is a child psychiatrist and expert on neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Constantino is the inaugural System Chief of Behavioral and Mental Health at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. He is a Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Genetics at the Emory University School of Medicine.
Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller is an American epidemiologist and Distinguished University Professor Emerita in the Department of Epidemiology & Population Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she first joined the faculty in 1969. She also serves as Dorothy and William Manealoff Foundation and Molly Rosen Chair in Social Medicine Emerita at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as a principal investigator of their Women's Health Initiative, and as co-principal investigator for their site in the Hispanic Community Health Study. She is a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Heart Association.
The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) is an international consortium of scientists dedicated to conducting meta- and mega-analyses of genomic-wide genetic data, with a focus on psychiatric disorders. It is the largest psychiatric consortium ever created, including over 800 researchers from 38 countries as of 2019. Its goal is to generate information about the genetics of psychiatric conditions that will be "actionable", that is, "genetic findings whose biological implications can be used to improve diagnosis, develop rational therapeutics, and craft mechanistic approaches to primary prevention". The consortium makes the main findings from its research freely available for use by other researchers.
Jessie Jacobsen is a senior lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Auckland. In 2007 she won MacDiarmid Young Scientist of the Year. Her research field is neurogenetics.
Sagiv Shifman is an Israeli scientist, professor in the field of neurogenetics at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds the Arnold and Bess Zeldich Ungerman chair in Neurobiology.