DrAnna Need

I am a lecturer in the Centre for Psychiatry, within the Division of Brain Sciences. I work on the genetics of mental illness and cognition. My primary research goal is to identify genetic variants that have very strong highly penetrant effects on psychiatric and cognitive phenotypes. To this end, I am leading projects to identify and sequence families with extreme neurocognitive or psychiatric phenotypes, such as childhood-onset psychosis, very precocious cognitive development and severe personality disorders. Identifying such variants will help to elucidate the molecular processes underlying healthy neural processes and neurocognitive and mental disorders, and may eventually lead to the development of improved treatments.

My work also explores the potential of next generation genetic diagnosis within child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). I am investigating how frequently children with mental illness have a simple, identifiable genetic cause. This will help us to determine whether, when and why we should we be referring children with mental illness for genetics services.

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Liverpool, graduating in July 2000 with a first class degree in genetics. My doctoral research was carried out at University College London (UCL) with Professor Peter Giese (), investigating the genetics of learning and memory in mice. After being awarded my PhD in 2004, I completed five years of postdoctoral training, first at UCL, then at the Centre for Human Genome Variation at Duke University.

In July 2009 I became Assistant Professor in Medicine at Duke University. Whilst I was at Duke, I built and analyzed two genetic cohorts. The first was designed to investigate the genetics of learning and memory in humans and is now part of the Cognitive Genomics Consortium (COGENT). The second was a cohort of schizophrenia patients and their family members. This work enabled us to publish one of the first genome wide association studies (GWAS) of schizophrenia, and to use exome and genome sequencing to rule out a role for moderate-frequency, highly penetrant sequence variants in schizophrenia. We also published the first investigation of the effectiveness of exome sequencing in a heterogeneous clinical genetics setting, showing it to be a highly effective method for genetic diagnosis in cases that have eluded traditional approaches. This work set the scene for much larger projects such as Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) and the 100,000 genomes project.

I returned to the UK to take up a position as Lecturer of Neurogenetics at Imperial in May 2013. As well as my research, I am active in teaching. I co-lead the mental health module of the Neurosciences and Mental Health BSc course and co-lead the Genomics of Common and Rare Disease module for the MSc in Genomic Medicine. I also regularly supervise undergraduate and graduate student research projects. As a member of the Development and Opportunities committee for the Department of Medicine, I work as part of the Athena SWAN self-assessment group to try to ensure equality in research and career progression at Imperial.