Psychiatric Genomics

Dr. Evangelia Eirini Tsermpini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Pharmacogenetics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, since September 2021. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2016 from the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Patras, where she worked in the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy under the supervision of Professor George Patrinos. After her Ph.D., she worked as an academic scholar at the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacy of the University of Patras, and a senior research scientist and group leader at the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy at the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Patras, until July 2021. She was a visiting scholar at the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, a research associate at RIKEN, Genomic Research Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan, as well as at the Department of Neuroscience and Clinical Pharmacology, University of Cagliari, in Italy. Her field of expertise is psychiatric genomics, pharmacogenomics, transcriptomics and epigenomics. Her research is related to identifying genetic biomarkers associated with the development of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, alcohol use disorder and psychiatric drugs response. Other research interests include discovering and assessing miRNAs biomarkers for early diagnosis of schizophrenia and antipsychotic response and investigating leukocyte telomere length in mental disorders. Furthermore, from 2016 and until 2021 she was actively involved in the First European Implementation study, funded by the European Commission. Dr. Tsermpini has received twice the first prize for the high quality of research during her Ph.D. She has published 28 scientific articles, six chapters in international peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, and many abstracts in international conference proceedings. She is a reviewer for several scientific journals and an evaluator in grant evaluation committees. Martin Alda, MD, FRCPC is a Professor of Psychiatry and Killam Chair in Mood Disorders at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. An active clinician, Dr. Alda works as the head of the Mood Disorders Program at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. After graduating from the medical school at Charles University in Prague, he trained in psychiatry at Charles University and at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Alda's work has been at the junction of clinical and basic research, investigating genetic and neurobiological markers of mood disorders and response to treatment. His clinical, genetic, pharmacogenetic, and brain imaging studies are based on carefully characterized prospective clinical samples and their aim is to develop methods of personalized treatment in psychiatry. George P. Patrinos is a Professor of Pharmacogenomics and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology in the University of Patras (Greece), Department of Pharmacy, and Head of Division of Pharmacology and Biosciences of the same department and holds adjunct Full Professorships at Erasmus MC, Faculty of Medicine, and Health Sciences, Rotterdam (the Netherlands), and the United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine, Department of Genetics and Genomics, Al-Ain (UAE). Also, from 2018 until the end of 2024, he was Chair of the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC). He served 12.5 years as a full member and Greece's National representative in the CHMP Pharmacogenomics Working Party of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). George has more than 340 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, some of them in leading scientific journals, such as The Lancet, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetic, Nucleic Acids Research, Genes & Development. He has also coauthored and coedited more than 15 textbooks, among which the renowned textbook Molecular Diagnostics, published by Academic Press, now in its 3rd edition, while he is the editor of Translational and Applied Genomics book series, published by Elsevier. Furthermore, he serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the prestigious Pharmacogenomics Journal (TPJ), published by Nature Publishing Group, Associate Editor, and member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, and advisory and evaluation committees. Apart from that, George is the main coorganizer of the Golden Helix Conferences, an international meeting series on Pharmacogenomics and Genomic Medicine with more than 50 conferences organized in more than 25 countries worldwide.