The Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded each year by the ISPG to a scientist(s) who made a major contribution to the advancement of the field of Psychiatric Genetics.
Professor Anita Thapar FRCPsych, PhD, CBE, FMedSci
Anita is a clinical academic child and adolescent psychiatrist at Cardiff University. She trained in Medicine in Cardiff and then undertook postgraduate clinical training in Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in South Wales.
Her interest in genetics was stimulated by the late Peter McGuffin and his wife Anne Farmer, also a clinical academic. Peter became head of Psychiatry and created the initial Cardiff group in psychiatric genetics, recruiting Mike Owen as well as Michael O’Donovan and Nick Craddock. Anita, as a child and adolescent psychiatrist did an MRC funded clinical training PhD fellowship on twin studies of childhood psychopathology. At that time, genetics was not considered as relevant by most clinicians in child and adolescent psychiatry. She set up a twin register and conducted a series of twin studies examining youth depression, anxiety, ADHD, comorbidities and life events.
Following her PhD, she moved to Manchester University and together with colleagues in Cardiff conducted molecular genetic studies of ADHD. Her interest was fueled by clinical work where she saw many families with ADHD and also because her PhD findings highlighted ADHD as especially heritable. She returned to Cardiff in 1999 to become the first Professor in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Wales.
As well as doing an early (of course underpowered) GWAS of ADHD, she and the Cardiff team observed enrichment of CNVs in ADHD that overlapped with Autism. At that time the findings implicating genetics in ADHD etiology was considered controversial by many.
Since then her research has focused more on population-based cohort studies of children and youth and spanned research on the genetics and long-term development of ADHD, depression and other youth psychopathology. Her research has always focused on questions that might be clinically important.
For example, the clinical and genetic/biological overlaps between ADHD and ASD and across neurodevelopmental disorders persuaded her to push for Wales to develop child neurodevelopmental (rather than ADHD, ASD separately) services.
Her current genetics research focuses primarily on youth depression through the £10 million Wolfson Award for a Centre in Youth Mental Health in Cardiff.
Since 2015, she has been the lead editor (together with Dr. Daniel S. Pine, NIMH) of the authoritative international textbook Rutter's Textbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Anita was awarded a CBE (Queen’s honor) for services to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2017, the President’s Medal from the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2015 for contributions to policy, public knowledge, education and meeting population and patient care needs and the Ruane Prize 2015 from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, USA for outstanding Child & Adolescent Psychiatric research. She has served on Welsh Government Child and Adolescent Mental Health Policy groups and is also on the Ministerial Advisory Group for neurodiversity. She a board member of Trustees for the UK Charity ADHD Foundation and recently been appointed as co-chair of an NHS England ADHD Taskforce.
THEODORE REICH EARLY CAREER AWARD
Theodore (Ted) Reich (1938 – 2003) was the first President of ISPG and was both an outstanding researcher and mentor to young scientists. The award is made for published work on psychiatric genetics that is of exceptional merit to candidates who have finished their training within the last ten years in the year of their nomination.
Dr. Na Cai
Dr Na Cai is a Principal Investigator at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Helmholtz Munich, and an associated faculty at the Technical University of Munich School of Medicine and Health. She received her BA in Natural Sciences Tripos (Biological) from Cambridge University in 2011, and her DPhil from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in University of Oxford in 2016. Na’s research focuses on understanding how genetic variants contribute to the heterogeneous etiologies of psychiatric disorders, in particular Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), either directly or in interaction with physiological and external environments. In particular, her lab uses
statistical genetics methods as tools to assess the validity of psychiatric disorder phenotypes from large scale genomic datasets, drawing attention to the importance of distinguishing and identifying specific genetic contributions to different disorder definitions and characteristics. To this end, she leads the heterogeneity subgroup of the PGC-MDD working group, and is an active member of the PGC Cross Disorder (CDX) Working Group and the schizophrenia (SCZ) working group diagnostic committee. In addition to finding statistical associations, Na’s lab aims to use bulk tissue, single-cell and spatial omics data from both human subjects and mouse models to elucidate the molecular pathways, tissue specificity, physiological context and environmental modulators of neuronal function that may contribute to psychiatric disorders.
GERSHON PAPER OF THE YEAR AWARD
In honor of Dr. Elliot Gershon, the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics presents the Gershon Paper of the Year Award to a recipient who has been published in the past year (June 2022 to present) in the psychiatric genetics field.
Dr. Rodrigo R. R. Duarte
Dr. Rodrigo R. R. Duarte is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology &
Neuroscience at King's College London. He earned his MSc in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of São Paulo in 2012 and his PhD in Neuroscience from King's College London in 2017. Dr. Duarte's research focuses on elucidating the polygenic architecture underlying complex neuropsychiatric conditions, with a particular emphasis on the role of ancient viral DNA. Utilizing statistical genetics and omic approaches, he aims to translate findings from large genetic association studies into a deeper understanding of risk mechanisms for neuropsychiatric disorders, with the ultimate goal of identifying potential drug targets or biomarkers.
This manuscript is the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration spanning genetics, neuroscience, bioinformatics, and virology, led by Dr. Duarte and Dr. Timothy Powell from King's College London, and Prof. Douglas Nixon from Northwell Health. The authors hope that their research will transform our understanding of the role ancient viral DNA plays in the human genome and their importance in medical conditions. They extend their gratitude to the CommonMind Consortium and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium for their invaluable data contributions that made this research possible.
Richard Todd (1952 – 2008) was an internationally known expert on the influences of genetics and environment on psychiatric illness in children. The award is given by the ISPG for excellence in the area of Childhood Psychiatric Disorders.
Elise Robinson
Elise Robinson is a faculty member in the Center for Genomic Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is also an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Robinson’s research focuses on the genetic influences on behavior and cognition. She is interested in using genetic data to understand the biology of neurodevelopmental variation, and to study differences within and between neuropsychiatric disorders. She co-chairs the Autism Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the NeuroDevelopmental Variability Initiative (NDV) at the Broad Institute, and the NeuroDev project.
The Robinson lab uses techniques from statistical genetics and epidemiology to study common and rare genetic risk factors for severe neuropsychiatric disorders, and develops quantitative approaches for examining their human behavioral and cellular associations. Robinson received a Sc.D. in psychiatric epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, and completed postdoctoral training in statistical genetics at MGH and the Broad Institute.