Yeargen Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics Patrick Sullivan, MD, was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health Grant for sequencing and trans-diagnostic phenotyping of severe mental illness in diverse populations, taking previous research in a new and interesting direction to increase diversity and global representation.
Sullivan's new study is the largest of its kind, including 130,000 people with severe mental illnesses and looking at multiple types of genetic variation; common, rare, and those that change proteins. Like his previous work, this is meant to be a global study with particular efforts to study those who are understudied. Sullivan's co-PI's include James Walters, MD, PhD, of Cardiff University and Alexander Charney, MD, PhD, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Sullivan also is a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. His lab investigates the molecular genetics of schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, including post-partum depression, and eating disorders. With funding from the departments of genetics and psychiatry, he leads the UNC Center for Psychiatric Genomics. Sullivan is a founder and principal investigator of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the largest consortium in the history of psychiatry. He is involved in a wide range of genomic studies of human diseases, has multiple NIH grants, and has published over 400 papers and 40 reviews/chapters.
