The Pamela Sklar Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellowship

The Pamela Sklar Fellowship offers an opportunity for advanced study and research in Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience, and serves as a bridge between clinical training and the development of a research career. The fellowship is open to Harvard Medical School (HMS) residents and a small number of other residency programs, contingent upon the ability of the candidate to relocate to the Boston area. The Sklar Fellowship is sponsored by the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute, and, for HMS residents, by the MGH-McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Residency Research Concentration Program and the Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard Longwood Residency Program. The award provides funding for one to two years of research and study after residency training. A total of 1-2 new awards are granted each year.

The application cycle for the 2022-2023 fellowships is now closed.

Questions about the fellowship should be directed to:

Susanne Jakob
Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute
stanleyadmin@broadinstitute.org

About the 2021-2022 Fellow

Josh Salvi
Joshua Salvi M.D., Ph.D., received his M.D. degree from Weill Cornell Medical College and a Ph.D. in biophysics and neuroscience from Rockefeller University. He is currently a resident in the MGH/McLean Physician Scientist Training program in Psychiatry. Salvi is working with Dr. Justin Baker at McLean Hospital and is co-mentored by Dr. Kerry Ressler. He aims to explore genetic and behavioral phenotypes in mental illness, with a focus on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In his research, he plans to employ a large-scale dataset from the UK Biobank in conjunction with genetic, clinical, and digital phenotyping data from human subjects at the OCD Institute of McLean Hospital to explore the relationship of genetic variation with behavioral phenomic variance. Salvi intends to evaluate the hypothesis that patterns of structured movement variance lead to novel genomic findings that impact clinical outcomes in OCD and provide a foundation to more effectively study the pathophysiology of OCD and other movement disorders.
 

About the 2020 – 2021 Fellow 

Whitney McFadden
Whitney McFadden M.D., M.Phil., received her M.D. degree from the University of California San  DiegoSchool of Medicine, and subsequently combined her psychiatric residency with a Ph.D. research program working with Dr. Pamela Sklar at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. McFadden is currently a post-doctoral fellow working with Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute, and is co-mentored by Dr. Jordan Smoller at the Broad Institute. McFadden is working to identify the single cell transcriptome from brain organoid models from individual patients with schizophrenia. She is combining data from deep clinical phenotyping, polygenic risk scores, and single-cell brain organoid transcriptomics to find genes of interest and to define patients at risk. She is aiming to use the data to help discover novel treatment responses for individuals with high polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia.

About the 2019 – 2021 Fellow 

Baktash Babadi
Baktash Babadi, M.D., Ph.D., is a graduate of Tehran University and the PhD program at Columbia University and a resident in the MGH/McLean Research Concentration Program, having also completed a post-doc position as a Swartz Fellow at Harvard Univeristy. Babadi is working with Dr. Daphne Holt and Dr. Roger Tootell at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and is co-mentored by Dost Ongur. His current research project is to design and perform a series of behavioral tests to track the deficits in visual information processing through the visual hierarchy in schizophrenia patients. In parallel, he is developing a computational model that can potentially relate those deficits to certain cellular and circuit dysfunctions is schizophrenia. Ultimately, Babadi aims to examine the predictions of the model by functional neuroimaging in patients with schizophrenia.

Former Sklar Fellows

Robert Mealer
Robert G. Mealer, M.D., Ph.D., is the 2017-2019 Stanley Center Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellow. Mealer is a graduate of the MD/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University and a resident in the MGH/McLean Research Concentration Program. Mealer is working with Jordan Smoller, Ed Scolnick and Maurizio Fava to elucidate the role of a manganese transporter in the etiology of schizophrenia, with the goal of identifying disease biomarkers and novel therapeutics.

Anthony Deo
Anthony J. Deo, M.D., Ph.D., is the first external 2017-2019 Stanley Center Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellow, coming from the New York-Presbyterian Hospital Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Residency Training Program of Columbia and Cornell Universities where he was the Leon Levy Fellow in Neuroscience. He earned his Ph.D. at New York University and his M.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. He has joined Paola Arlotta’s lab to develop a cerebral organoid model for the study of CNS disorders, focusing on schizophrenia.

Michael Murphy
Michael Murphy, M.D., was the 2016-2017 Stanley Center Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellow. Murphy is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (B.S., M.D., and Ph.D.), and was Chief Resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and a resident in the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Residency. He worked with Broad associate members Dost Ongur and Diego Pizzagalli to develop work he first began as a doctoral student: using electroencephalography (hd-EEG) to measure the activity of the brain during waking, sleep, and anesthesia.

Thomas McCoy
Thomas McCoy, M.D., was the 2015-2016 Stanley Center Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellow. McCoy is a graduate of Dartmouth College (A.B.) and Weill Cornell Medical College (M.D.), and was a resident in the MGH/McLean Hospital adult psychiatry program. He worked with Broad associate member Roy Perlis on developing a high-throughput computational approach to deep, multi-dimensional psychiatric phenotyping.

Evan Macosko
Evan Macosko, M.D., Ph.D., was the 2014-2016 Stanley Center Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellow. Macosko is a graduate of Harvard College (B.A.), Rockefeller University (Ph.D.), and Weill Cornell Medical College (M.D.), and had postdoctoral appointments at MGH/McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His research project, mentored by Steve McCarroll and performed in collaboration with Aviv Regev and David Weitz, helped address a critical need in neuroscience: defining the RNA transcriptome in individual cells of the human brain. Evan’s work during the fellowship period led to the development of DropSeq, and the Macosko lab is now developing new tools here at the Stanley Center.