Shaun M. Purcell is a British genetic epidemiologist and statistical geneticist. He is a senior associate member of the

Broad Institute The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U ...

of MIT and

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and its

Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research The Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is a multi-disciplinary biomedical research program located in Cambridge, Massachusetts that studies the biological basis of psychiatric disease. The center was fou ...

. He is also a faculty member at the

Brigham and Women's Hospital Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is the second largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and the largest hospital in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Along with Massachusetts Gener ...

Department of

Psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry. Initial psych ...

. Having studied psychology and statistics at

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

, Purcell overcame the death of his supervisor

David Fulker David William Fulker (8 March 1937 – 9 July 1998) was a British behavioural geneticist at the University of Colorado's Institute for Behavioral Genetics. Among positions of esteem, he was elected president of the Behavior Genetics Associatio ...

one year into a behavioural genetics programme at the Institute of Psychiatry to complete his Ph.D. under

Pak Sham Pak Chung Sham is a psychiatric geneticist. He holds the Suen Chi-Sun Professorship in Clinical Science at the University of Hong Kong, where he is also the Chair Professor in Psychiatric Genomics, Director of the Centre for Genomic Sciences, and ...

. He developed the

PLINK Putty is a material with high plasticity, similar in texture to clay or dough, typically used in domestic construction and repair as a sealant or filler. Although some types of putty (typically those using linseed oil) slowly polymerise and beco ...

genetics software during postdoctoral work with Mark Daly at the

Whitehead Institute Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepen ...

. He is also known for his research on the genetic bases of

mental disorder A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...

s such as

schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...

and

bipolar disorder Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally elevated mood that last from days to weeks each. If the elevated mood is severe or associated with ...

, largely undertaken during faculty appointments at

Massachusetts General Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United Stat ...

and

Mount Sinai Mount Sinai ( he , הר סיני ''Har Sinai''; Aramaic: ܛܘܪܐ ܕܣܝܢܝ ''Ṭūrāʾ Dsyny''), traditionally known as Jabal Musa ( ar, جَبَل مُوسَىٰ, translation: Mount Moses), is a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. It is ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

References

External links

* Living people British emigrants to the United States Genetic epidemiologists Alumni of King's College London Alumni of the University of Oxford Statistical geneticists Massachusetts General Hospital faculty Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai faculty Psychiatric geneticists Year of birth missing (living people) British epidemiologists British geneticists British statisticians {{Geneticist-stub