Shaun Purcell

My first degrees were in Experimental Psychology, from the University of Oxford and University of London; my PhD was from the Institute of Psychiatry, under the mentorship of Pak Sham. After completing a UK Medical Research Council Fellowship at the Whitehead Institute, I joined the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston. At MGH, my primary focus was in neuropsychiatric genetics, working with colleagues at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. My main projects centered around developing statistical and computational tools for the design of genetic studies (including the PLINK software package), the detection of gene variants influencing complex human traits and the dissection of these effects in the larger context of other genetic and environmental factors. Together with many colleagues, I participated in several landmark genome-wide association and exome-sequencing studies of neuropsychiatric disease. I am currently based at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. My current focus is to better understand the links between sleep, behavior, cognition and psychiatric disease, using human genetic and computational approaches, with the aim of providing opportunities for precision medicine and targeted interventions in neuropsychiatric disease.