Project:

Drs Tian Ge and Alysa Doyle are seeking a post-doctoral fellow to join their collaborative project aiming to validate and demarcate the heritable biological underpinnings of specific cognitive systems that overlap with and extend beyond attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Such insights have implications for psychopathology models as well as clinical risk stratification and personalized patient care. The project will capitalize on transdiagnostic dimensional traits and multi-level links across genetics, brain systems and behavior. They plan to use a range of resources, including advances in cognition genomics, novel computational strategies, and available data sets and biobanks. Analyses will focus on implementing cutting-edge statistical genetics methods related to complex traits and extending them to individuals with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Involvement in other types of analyses (examining brain regions and neural circuitry; training machine learning models that integrate genetics and multimodal phenotypes with functional outcomes) is also possible.

Co-Mentors:

Tian Ge PhD

Dr. Ge is an applied mathematician and statistician by training with expertise in statistical genetics, brain imaging science, and biostatistics. His research has focused on integrating large-scale genomic, neuroimaging, behavioral, and clinical data to uncover the biological basis of brain disorders and to advance precision medicine. He has developed a range of statistical, machine learning, and computational methods to enable genomic analyses of big datasets, characterize the genetic underpinnings of brain structure and function, and elucidate the genomic and brain bases of human complex traits and common diseases. More recently, he has developed polygenic prediction methods which have been widely used to estimate individualized genetic liability for a broad range of phenotypes.

Dr. Ge received a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Fudan University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Warwick. He completed his postdoctoral training at the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and MGH Center for Genomic Medicine. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, a faculty member in the Center for Genomic Medicine and Director of Data Science in the Center for Precision Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Alysa E. Doyle, PhD

Dr. Doyle is a licensed psychologist with expertise in developmental psychopathology, pediatric neuropsychology, and psychiatric genetics. Her research aims to characterize neuropsychiatric illness across the lifespan, with the goals of improving evidence-based assessment, clarifying risk mechanisms, and mapping trajectories. She has a particular interest in understanding how genetic influences and cognitive capacities contribute to risk and resilience with regard to child psychopathology (particularly ADHD and pediatric onset mood disorders) and whether information from these domains can be leveraged in the clinic to improve patient outcomes. To support this work, she is collecting and analyzing a well-characterized cohort (N=2,000+) of youth referred for neuropsychiatric evaluation at Massachusetts General Hospital (the Longitudinal Study of Genetic Influences on Cognition; LOGIC).

Dr. Doyle completed her doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota and Pre- and Post-Doctoral Fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She currently holds faculty appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Genomic Medicine at MGH and leads an independently-funded lab in the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit. She is also Director of Research at the Learning and Emotional Assessment Program where she provides research mentorship and clinical supervision to junior faculty and post-doctoral fellows.