• A white building with a covered walkway.
  • lab members wearing lab hoodies

About Us

We study the genetics of severe mental illness. Specifically, we aim to characterize and predict psychiatric disease trajectories using genetic and high-dimensional phenotypic data resources, such as electronic health records. We have a special focus on studying genetic and environmental risk factors that contribute to the cause and course of illness in admixed Latin American populations, in Colombia, Brazil and the USA. Through Misión Origen, we are creating a biobank for Severe Mental Illness, consisting of 100,000 participants from the Paisa region of Colombia.

We are a research group in the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences in the Semel Institute of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. We are also affiliated with the Departments of Human Genetics and Computational Medicine and the Bioinformatics, and Biomath PhD programs.

Funded by:  NIH  |  Amazon