This K Award will facilitate the career development of the candidate by providing additional training in clinical psychopathology, neurobiology, biomarkers, and functional outcome to complement her graduate and post-graduate education in laboratory-based, molecular genetic methodologies and statistical genetics. At the end of the award period, Dr. Greenwood will thus be uniquely positioned to apply her newly acquired skills to important questions in translational neuroscience where there is an extensive interaction of clinical, model organism, and genomic questions that need to be addressed via an interdisciplinary """"""""convergent neurobiological"""""""" approach, which will integrate clinical information with cutting edge neuroscience and genomic methods. In order to achieve this integrative goal, Dr. Greenwood will take courses and practicums addressing clinical, neurobiological, epidemiological, and statistical issues. She will also receive training in structured diagnostic patient interviewing (e.g. SCID, DIGS/FIGS) in the context of Dr. Braff's Schizophrenia Research Program and Dr. Kelsoe's Bipolar Program at UCSD to provide her with practical knowledge regarding the clinical manifestations of these disorders. UCSD provides an excellent environment for translational neuroscience, which, along with her distinguished mentors and collaborators, will provide Dr. Greenwood with the requisite scientific context in which both training and the representative research project will be conducted. Dr. Greenwood's representative research project will tackle a challenging problem: quantifying and interpreting the """"""""overlap"""""""" of schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) from genomic and neurobiological standpoints. She will utilize extensive existing databases with which she is already familiar via her collaborations with Drs. Braff and Kelsoe in their large NIMH-funded consortium studies on SZ and BD. The fact that her two mentors are the lead investigators of these projects with their rich genomic and clinical databases gives Dr. Greenwood a unique opportunity to examine the convergence and divergence of genetic variation and neurobiological pathways in SZ and BD patients. In the longer term she will apply her newly acquired skills to do a detailed analysis of additional genetic determinants of clinical, biomarker, and functional outcome convergence and divergence in these two disorders.
Psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, exhibit genetic and clinical complexity and show a large degree of overlap. Defining the neurobiological bases of these debilitating disorders will require an interdisciplinary """"""""convergent neurobiological"""""""" approach that will integrate clinical information with cutting edge neuroscience and genomic methods. Building on her existing knowledge of molecular biology and statistical genetics with training in clinical psychopathology, neurobiology, biomarkers, and functional outcomes, the candidate will be in a unique position to tackle these important questions in the near future.
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