Tarjinder (TJ) Singh, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computational and Statistical Genomics (in Psychiatry)

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Associate Faculty, the New York Genome Center

From genes to function: Leveraging genomic insights from the past decade toward understanding the etiology of severe psychiatric disorders

In the last decade, genomic technologies and concerted worldwide efforts to create well- powered studies have helped characterize our knowledge of the genetic basis of mental disorders. This talk will discuss insights from global collaborative efforts to analyze sequence data from schizophrenia and bipolar patients to advance gene discovery. We will explore the genetic architecture of psychiatric disorders and how different variants have pinpointed specific genes associated with a particular diagnosis. We will discuss the challenges of moving from these genetic insights to biological mechanisms. Through this, we will discuss new and ongoing efforts to analyze population-scale electronic health record data to partition the phenotype heterogeneity in patients, the multimodal analysis of bipolar patient cell lines to characterize biology from regulatory variants, and opportunities from the functional genomics analysis of human postmortem tissue.

Relevant Publications:

Rare coding variants in ten genes confer substantial risk for schizophrenia

Genome-wide association studies

Host(s): Carol Mason (Faculty) 

Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

This event will be in-person only, open to Columbia University Affiliates
Speaker Location: Jerome L. Greene Science Center, 9th Floor Lecture Hall

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.