Current affiliation and goals

Dr. Shaun Purcell is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His current focus is on understanding the links between sleep, behavior, cognition, and psychiatric disease using human genetic and computational approaches, with the ultimate goal of enabling precision medicine and targeted interventions in neuropsychiatric disorders.

Academic background

Dr. Purcell's first degrees were in Experimental Psychology, from the University of Oxford and University of London (UCL); his PhD was from the SGDP, Institute of Psychiatry, KCL, under the mentorship of Pak Sham. After completing a Fellowship at the Whitehead Institute (sponsored by the UK Medical Research Council), he joined the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.

A major focus of Dr. Purcell’s earlier work was neuropsychiatric genetics, including work with colleagues at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. His research centered on developing statistical and computational tools for the design of genetic studies (including the PLINK software package), the detection of gene variants influencing complex human traits, and the dissection of these effects in the larger context of other genetic and environmental factors. Together with collaborators, he contributed to multiple landmark genome-wide association and exome-sequencing studies of neuropsychiatric disease.

Dr. Purcell’s current projects are primarily focused on sleep neurophysiology and psychiatric disease. In this, he collaborates closely with members of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders and the Sleep Epidemiology and Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.