Shaun Purcell

Last updated
Shaun Purcell
CitizenshipBritish
Alma mater University of Oxford
King's College London
Known for PLINK
Scientific career
Fields Statistical genetics
Institutions Brigham and Women's Hospital
Thesis Sample selection and complex effects in quantitative trait loci analysis  (2003)
Doctoral advisor Pak Sham
David Fulker

Shaun M. Purcell is a British genetic epidemiologist and statistical geneticist.

He is a senior associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and its Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also a faculty member at the Brigham and Women's Hospital Department of Psychiatry. [1]

Having studied psychology and statistics at Oxford University, Purcell overcame the death of his supervisor David Fulker one year into a behavioural genetics programme at the Institute of Psychiatry to complete his Ph.D. under Pak Sham. He developed the PLINK genetics software during postdoctoral work with Mark Daly at the Whitehead Institute. [2] He is also known for his research on the genetic bases of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, [3] [4] largely undertaken during faculty appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mount Sinai in Manhattan.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emil Kraepelin</span> German psychiatrist (1856–1926)

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin was a German psychiatrist.

Schizoaffective disorder is a mental disorder characterized by abnormal thought processes and an unstable mood. This diagnosis is made when the person has symptoms of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder: either bipolar disorder or depression. The main criterion for a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder is the presence of psychotic symptoms for at least two weeks without any mood symptoms present. Schizoaffective disorder can often be misdiagnosed when the correct diagnosis may be psychotic depression, bipolar I disorder, schizophreniform disorder, or schizophrenia. It is imperative for providers to accurately diagnose patients, as treatment and prognosis differ greatly for most of these diagnoses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience</span> Research institution in London, England

The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) is a research institution dedicated to discovering what causes mental illness and diseases of the brain. In addition, its aim is to help identify new treatments for them and ways to prevent them in the first place. The IoPPN is a faculty of King's College London, England, previously known as the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP).

The biopsychiatry controversy is a dispute over which viewpoint should predominate and form a basis of psychiatric theory and practice. The debate is a criticism of a claimed strict biological view of psychiatric thinking. Its critics include disparate groups such as the antipsychiatry movement and some academics.

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.

Peter McGuffin is a psychiatrist and geneticist from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In genetic epidemiology, endophenotype is a term used to separate behavioral symptoms into more stable phenotypes with a clear genetic connection. By seeing the EP notion as a special case of a larger collection of multivariate genetic models, which may be fitted using currently accessible methodology, it is possible to maximize its valuable potential lessons for etiological study in psychiatric disorders. The concept was coined by Bernard John and Kenneth R. Lewis in a 1966 paper attempting to explain the geographic distribution of grasshoppers. They claimed that the particular geographic distribution could not be explained by the obvious and external "exophenotype" of the grasshoppers, but instead must be explained by their microscopic and internal "endophenotype".The endophenotype idea represents the influence of two important conceptual currents in biology and psychology research. An adequate technology would be required to perceive the endophenotype, which represents an unobservable latent entity that cannot be directly observed with the unaided naked eye. In the investigation of anxiety and affective disorders, the endophenotype idea has gained popularity.

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior is a research institute of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). It includes a number of centers, including the "Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics", which uses DNA sequencing, gene expression studies, bioinformatics, and the genetic manipulation of model organisms to understand brain and behavioral phenotypes.

Alexander Bogdan ("Bob") Niculescu, III is a Romanian born, San Diego, California, educated and trained scientist and physician. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, Director of the Laboratory of Neurophenomics, and an Attending Psychiatrist and R&D Investigator at the Indianapolis VA Medical Center. Considered the inventor of Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG), he is a prominent figure in the field of personalized medicine in psychiatry. His early contributions to the psychiatric genetics field include identification of candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for bipolar disorder using convergent studies In particular, his work and that of his collaborators has focused attention on circadian clock genes as core components of mood regulation Since these contributions, his research program has expanded to include similar work on schizophrenia alcoholism and stress disorders leading to the identification of panels of DNA and RNA markers for disease risk prediction and severity of illness. Niculescu pioneered early on the view that psychiatric disorders are genetically complex, heterogeneous, and overlapping, requiring gene level integration of data followed by pathway analyses. The cumulative combinatorics of common variants and environment model he described for bipolar and other complex disorders based on empirical data, is being increasingly supported by evidence from other groups working on psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders. More recently, he has proposed a comprehensive unifying model (Mindscape) for conceptualizing how the mind works. His most recent work has focused on understanding and developing genomic and clinical risk predictors for suicide, a preventable tragedy and increasing public health problem.

Sophia Frangou is a professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where she heads the Psychosis Research Program. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and vice-chair of the RCPsych Panamerican Division. She is a Fellow of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) and of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). She served as vice-president for Research of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders from 2010 to 2014. She has also served on the Council of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. She is founding member of the EPA NeuroImaging section and founding chair of the Brain Imaging Network of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology. She is one of the two Editors of European Psychiatry, the official Journal of the European Psychiatric Association.

Anne Farmer is emeritus professor of psychiatric nosology at the Institute of Psychiatry and was formerly lead consultant in the Affective Disorders Unit at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the trust's director of medical education. Farmer's focus is on genetic research in affective disorders. Farmer was previously professor of psychiatry at the University of Wales College of Medicine.

Sir Michael John Owen 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela Sklar</span> American psychiatrist and neuroscientist

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lori L. Altshuler</span> American psychiatrist

Lori Altshuler was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and held the Julia S. Gouw Endowed Chair for Mood Disorders. Altshuler was the Director of the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program and the UCLA Women's Life Center, each being part of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA.

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.

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.

Marion Leboyer is a French psychiatrist, university professor and hospital practitioner at the Paris-Est Créteil University (UPEC).

References

  1. "Shaun Purcell". Broad Institute. 2013-02-22. Retrieved 2018-07-03.
  2. Purcell, Shaun. "About". Purcell lab @ BWH, Boston. Retrieved 2018-07-03.
  3. Allen, Rebecca (2017-07-17). "Weighing the Benefits of Genetic Information in Clinical Psychiatry". Psychiatric Times: 2. Retrieved 2018-07-03.
  4. DeNoon, Daniel J. (2009-07-01). "Genetic Pattern Found in Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder". WebMD. Retrieved 2018-07-03.