In March, Ansuman Chattopadhyay, head of the Health Sciences Library System’s Molecular Biology Information Service, traveled to Delhi, India, to lecture at the International Workshop on Psychiatric Genetics, Ethics and Related Methodological Issues. In addition to Chattopadhyay, other presenters included faculty from the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia, as well as the director of India’s Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD).
Over fifty clinicians and researchers from throughout India attended the two-day workshop. Program topics included ethics, cognitive research, distance education, genetic counseling, genetics, measurement of cognitive functions and soft signs, statistical methodology analysis, and bioinformatics.
Chattopadhyay’s lecture, “Online Resources for Psychiatric Genetics,” covered basic PubMed searching, identifying disease-causing genes, finding gene and protein-centered information, and predicting disease-causing SNPs.
The training program is supported through a five-year grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences. The principal investigator is Vishwajit Nimgaonkar, associate professor of human genetics at Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic.
~ Jill Foust