purcell lab

Background

My first degrees were in Experimental Psychology, from the University of Oxford and University of London (UCL); my PhD was from the SGDP, Institute of Psychiatry, KCL, under the mentorship of Pak Sham. After completing a Fellowship at the Whitehead Institute with Mark Daly (sponsored by the UK Medical Research Council), I joined the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in 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.

Current affiliations and goals

I am currently based in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham & Women's Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, where I collaborate closely with members of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders and the Sleep Epidemiology and Medicine program.

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.