Summary
Psychiatric disorders are highly heritable conditions constituting a leading cause of disability and impaired life quality. In spite of decades of research and interventions, knowledge about how psychiatric problems develop is still severely limited, and the burden is rising globally. Novel approaches are necessary to advance the field. The Helse Sør-Øst career grant will support Dr Havdahl in establishing the Psychiatric Genetic Epidemiology (PaGE) research group at Lovisenberg Diaconal Hospital. In PaGE, we are in a unique position to generate valuable insights by combining recent advancements across multiple disciplines, and by leveraging data from multiple population cohorts such as the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort (MoBa) of more than 200,000 participants. PaGE has the following core scientific objectives: 1) Elucidating how genetic risk for psychiatric disorder is expressed in early development, 2) Distinguishing genetic and environmental pathways of within-family transmission of psychiatric disorders, and 3) Identifying causal environmental risk and protective factors for psychiatric disorders. The career grant will facilitate the group achieving these objectives by supporting our implementation of causal methodologies, consolidating collaborations with international experts in the field, and recruiting a talented postdoctoral fellow, with skills complementary to the current members, to carry out novel analyses.
Primary and secondary objectives
Aim 1: Build PaGE into a robust, independent research group producing scientific outputs at the forefront of international research. Aim 2: Develop efficient workflows and analytic pipelines to facilitate an increasing number of publications and collaborations in each of the three core scientific objectives (provided in the summary above). Aim 3: Recruit a talented doctoral fellow to develop an analytic pipeline to optimize several different analyses which each makes use of the family structure within MoBa.
