Smoller Laboratory

About the Lab

Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. He is the associate chief for research for the Mass General Department of Psychiatry and director of psychiatric genetics. He is director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in Mass General's Center for Human Genetics Research. Dr. Smoller also serves as co-director of the Genetics and Genomics Unit of the Mass General Clinical Research Program, is an associate member of the Broad Institute and a senior scientist at the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research.

Dr. Smoller earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University and his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. After completing residency training in psychiatry at McLean Hospital, Dr. Smoller received masters and doctoral degrees in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Training Program in Psychiatric Genetics.

The focus of Dr. Smoller’s research interests has been the identification of genetic determinants of childhood and adult psychiatric disorders. Dr. Smoller and colleagues have also been studying genetic predictors of treatment response and the ways in which advances in genetics may impact clinical practice in psychiatry. He is an author of more than 200 scientific articles, book chapters and reviews; the recipient of numerous research awards; and a principal investigator on NIH-funded studies of the genetics of anxiety and the genetics of bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia as well as brain imaging phenotypes.

Research Projects

International Cohort Collection for Bipolar Disorder

The major goals of this project are to collect a large cohort of bipolar disorder cases and unaffected controls and construct a harmonized data source for genome-wide studies. The cohort will combined phenotypic data from the U.S. case-control sample with a parallel, separately funded European case-control sample.

Gene Regulation and Linkage Analysis in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia

PIs: Bruce Cohen and Dost Ongur
The goal of this study is to examine genetic variants associated with psychotic disorders in a large cohort of patients with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder.

Exposure, D-Cycloserine Enhancement and Genetic Modulators in Panic Disorder

PI: Mark Pollack
The major goals of this project are to compare the acute efficacy of d-cycloserine (DCS) augmentation relative to placebo augmentation of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for the treatment of patients with panic disorder, examine the longer-term effects of DCS and to examine whether genetic loci strongly implicated in the neurobiology of fear conditioning and extinction are associated with extinction learning in response to CBT alone or CBT/DCS treatment.

Postdocs

• Chia-Yen Chen, ScD
• Karmel Choi, PhD, Clinical and Research Fellow
• Yen-Chen (Anne) Feng, PhD
• Robert Mealer, MD, PhD, Psychiatry Resident
• Randi Schuster, PhD, Clinical and Research Fellow
• Amanda Zheutlin, PhD, Research Fellow

Graduate Students

• Yen-Feng Lin, MD, MS, MHS
• Meg Ming-Jung Wang, MSc
• Vicki Wang
• Qiu-Yue Zhong

Affiliated Investigators

• Mei-Hua Hall, PhD
• Mert Sabuncu, PhD
• Avram Holmes, PhD
• Justin Baker, MD
• Tamar Katz, MD, PhD

Publications

See a complete list of Dr. Smoller's publications on PubMed.