Psychiatric Genomics. Translational and Applied Genomics

Authors

Evangelia Eirini Tsermpini Laboratory of Pharmacogenetics, Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Dr. Evangelia Eirini Tsermpini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Pharmacogenetics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, since September 2021. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2016 from the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Patras, where she worked in the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy under the supervision of Professor George Patrinos. After her Ph.D., she worked as an academic scholar at the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacy of the University of Patras, and a senior research scientist and group leader at the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy at the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Patras, until July 2021. She was a visiting scholar at the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, a research associate at RIKEN, Genomic Research Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan, as well as at the Department of Neuroscience and Clinical Pharmacology, University of Cagliari, in Italy. Her field of expertise is psychiatric genomics, pharmacogenomics, transcriptomics and epigenomics. Her research is related to identifying genetic biomarkers associated with the development of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, alcohol use disorder and psychiatric drugs response. Other research interests include discovering and assessing miRNAs biomarkers for early diagnosis of schizophrenia and antipsychotic response and investigating leukocyte telomere length in mental disorders. Furthermore, from 2016 and until 2021 she was actively involved in the First European Implementation study, funded by the European Commission. Dr. Tsermpini has received twice the first prize for the high quality of research during her Ph.D. She has published 28 scientific articles, six chapters in international peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, and many abstracts in international conference proceedings. She is a reviewer for several scientific journals and an evaluator in grant evaluation committees. Martin Alda Professor and Killam Chair in Mood Disorders, Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University; Head, Mood Disorders Program NS Health Authority, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Martin Alda, MD, FRCPC is a Professor of Psychiatry and Killam Chair in Mood Disorders at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. An active clinician, Dr. Alda works as the head of the Mood Disorders Program at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. After graduating from the medical school at Charles University in Prague, he trained in psychiatry at Charles University and at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Alda's work has been at the junction of clinical and basic research, investigating genetic and neurobiological markers of mood disorders and response to treatment. His clinical, genetic, pharmacogenetic, and brain imaging studies are based on carefully characterized prospective clinical samples and their aim is to develop methods of personalized treatment in psychiatry. George P. Patrinos Department of Pharmacy, School of Health Sciences, University of Patras, Patras, Greece; Department of Genetics and Genomics, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates; Zayed Center of Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates.

George P. Patrinos is Professor of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology in the University of Patras (Greece), Department of Pharmacy, Head of Division of Pharmacology and Biosciences of the same Department and holds adjunct Full Professorships at Erasmus MC, Faculty of Medicine, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and the United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine, Department of Genetics and Genomics, Al-Ain (UAE). Also, since March 2018, he is Chair of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC) and since May 2023 Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the ASPIRE Abu Dhabi Precision Medicine Research Institute. He has ample regulatory experience, as he served for 12.5 years as Full Member and Greece's National representative in the CHMP Pharmacogenomics Working Party of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and he is still an active member of the European Medicines Agency participating in expert panels to provide scientific advice where needed. George is currently Director of the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy, the first officially established academic pharmacogenomics laboratory in Greece. His group has keen interest in research covering disciplines from wet and dry lab and public health genomics projects, all focusing on pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine. In particular, his research interests involve discovery work and clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics, focusing in particular in psychiatry but also cardiology and oncology, genomics of rare disorders and transcriptional regulation of human fetal globin genes. Moreover, George's group is internationally recognized for its involvement in developing National/Ethnic Genetic databases to document the genetic heterogeneity in different populations worldwide and of genome informatics tools to translate genomic information into a clinically meaningful format. Also, George's group has a keen interest in public health genomics to critically assess the impact of genomics to society and public health. George has more than 330 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, some of them in leading scientific journals, such as The Lancet and Lancet EBioMedicine. Also, he has co-authored and co-edited more than 15 textbooks, among which the renowned textbook "Molecular Diagnostics�, published by Academic Press, now in its 3rd edition, while he is the editor of "Translational and Applied Genomics� book series, published by Elsevier. Furthermore, since September 2020, he serves as Editor-In-Chief of the prestigious Pharmacogenomics Journal (TPJ), published by Nature Publishing Group, Associate Editor and member of the editorial board of several scientific journals and has been a member of several international boards and advisory and evaluation committees. Apart from that, George is the main co-organizer of the Golden Helix Conferences, an international meeting series on Pharmacogenomics and Genomic Medicine with more than 50 conferences organized in more than 25 countries worldwide.