Radhika Kandaswamy

I am delighted to be part of Dr Chloe Wong’s team at the SGDP centre. I completed my PhD at UCL in the Department of Molecular Psychiatry under the supervision of Professor Hugh Gurling. During this time I worked on the molecular genetics of bipolar disorder and resequenced two glutamate receptor genes, GRM3 and GRM7. I then went on to functionally characterise a Kozak sequence mutation in GRM3.

Following my PhD, I worked as a Postdoctoral training fellow at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton where I worked with Professor Richard Houlston on characterising susceptibility genes for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. I also had the opportunity to learn chromosome conformation capture techniques such as Hi-C, 4C and 3C and study the long-range interactions between loci regulating the transcriptome.

At the SGDP, I will be working on the E-Risk study, assessing the impact of psychosocial stress during adolescence on the DNA methylome of MZ twins. I am really excited about this opportunity and happy to be working with a wonderful team.