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• genetics, genomics and molecular biology
• neuroscience and mental health

• Psychiatry

• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Dementia
• Neurophysiology
• Neuropsychiatry
• Psychiatry

The goal of research at NICOG is to use genetic, neurocognitive and neuroimaging studies to understand the biological basis of common adult psychiatric disorders. NICOG is led by four PIs (including Dr Morris) and contains >25 researchers. Over the last 6 years it has received >€4.3M in grant funding and achieved multiple publications in top international journals including Nature and Nature Genetics.

Specific interests include:
(A) Understanding the contribution of genetic risk to social disability by measuring the effects of these variants on cortical and behavioural measures of social cognition.
(B) Investigating neural connectivity within the brain in terms of (1) structural connectivity: integrity of white matter tracts connecting different parts of the brain; (2) Functional connectivity: the correlation of activity between different parts of the brain; and (3) Effective connectivity: establishing the effect of one group of neurons on another.
(C) Establishing whether and how cognitive deficits associated with major psychiatric disorder can be ameliorated by behavioural interventions known as cognitive remediation therapy.

Research will focus on new schizophrenia risk genes that function in epigenetic mechanisms, i.e. these are “controller” genes that regulate the functions of other genes. Epigenetic regulation has been shown to be an important part of the biology of cognitive performance. This is important because cognitive deficits are a core feature of schizophrenia and are key factors for explaining disability in schizophrenia, leading to significant unemployment and social isolation. The causes of disability are poorly understood and not effectively targeted by current treatments. One major reason for the drought in new treatments is a lack of understanding of the shared biology of cognition and schizophrenia. This research aims to use large genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC; http://www.med.unc.edu/pgc) and the UK Biobank (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/) to identify the genes with epigenetic functions that contribute to cognitive deficits in patients and use this new knowledge to build towards new treatments.

NICOG is a highly interactive research environment with fortnightly presentations by our researchers, frequent talks from external speakers, as well as an annual Research Day. Participation in international conferences is strongly encouraged, as are applications for further independent grant funding. Through our international research networks such as PGC and the ENIGMA neuroimaging consortium (http://enigma.ini.usc.edu/), there is opportunity for collaboration and research visits to leading international labs.