Dr. Na Cai appointed as BRCCH Professor of Computational Medical Genomics

In February 2025, Dr. Na Cai will join the Basel Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) as an Assistant Professor of Computational Medical Genomics. She is currently leading a research group at Helmholtz Pioneer Campus at the Technical University of Munich, where she investigates the genetic bases of psychiatric disorders, particularly Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). This debilitating mental disorder manifests in a wide range of clinical symptoms, including depressed mood, anhedonia or sleep disturbance. In spite of its high prevalence worldwide, the strong polygenic nature of MDD and its heterogenous symptomatology hinder the identification of the biological factors causing this disease

 

Leveraging clinical and genomic datasets from biobanks and electronic health records, Dr. Na Cai and her group have developed a new computational and statistical approach to associate genetic variants with symptoms-based MDD subtypes (e.g. childhood depression vs late onset of MDD). In the future, she aims at developing new computational models to predict disease trajectories of MDD as well as examining the impact of MDD genetic factors in the context of other psychiatric disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which often co-occurs with childhood MDD. Moreover, she will employ multi-omic approaches combined with machine learning methods to assess the impact of environmental risk factors such as childhood abuse or chronical social stress in individuals genetically predisposed to experience MDD.

 

 

 

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