Peter

P.

Zandi

,

PhD

I am a psychiatric epidemiologist with expertise in genetic epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacogenetics, and mental health informatics. I am Vice-Chair of Research for the Department of Mental Health. I also co-direct research for the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry, and I direct an NIMH supported Psychiatric Epidemiology Training (PET) Program to train the next generation of psychiatric epidemiologists in using “big data” to study mental illnesses. I am engaged in translational and mulit-disciplinary research to understand the causes of severe mental illnesses, particularly mood disorders including depression and bipolar disorder, and develop more effective strategies to reduce the burden of these illnesses in the population. In my genetic epidemiology work, I lead a “dry” laboratory that uses statistical genetics and bioinformatics tools to manage, analyze and interpret high-throughput genomic data from genome-wide association, expression, sequencing and epigenetic studies of complex psychiatric disorders. In my pharmacoepidemiology work, I investigate pharmacological strategies for the treatment and prevention of severe mental illnesses using both observational and randomized study designs. Bringing together my interests in genetic and pharmacoepidemiology, I study the pharmacogenetics of safety and efficacy responses to psychotropic medications with the goal of developing genomic predictors that can be used to personalize treatment and prevention strategies. Finally, I have been working to develop new approaches that leverage emerging health informatics technologies, such as electronic medical records and mobile technology, for carrying out the next generation of large scale psychiatric epidemiology research.