Fernando Sampaio Goes, M.D.

I am a psychiatrist with post-doctoral training in mood disorders and psychiatric genetics. Most of my research focus has been on the genetics of bipolar disorder and I have participated in a number of clinically based genetic studies, being involved in patient recruitment, phenotype assessment and data analyses.

Our research group is involved in a number mood disorder related projects, ranging from laboratory efforts to clinically based pharmacogenetic studies.  As a disease oriented clinician-scientist my goal is to help identify etiological clues that will ultimately facilitate development of novel treatments. I have led a number of genome-wide association analyses of “intermediate” phenotypes between mood and psychotic disorders that may have relevance for both gene discovery and psychiatric nosology. The more recent focus on my work has been to utilize next-generation sequencing technology to uncover the role of rare variation in mood disorder.   I am involved in a number of large-scale studies of bipolar disorder, including both family based and case-control approaches and I also play an active role in the Bipolar Sequencing Consortium, which is performing an ongoing meta-analysis of bipolar sequencing studies

As a complement to the genetic studies, we have also become more involved in functional studies using both post-mortem samples and induced pluripotent stem cell models of mood disorders. This is perform in collaboration with scientists in the division of neuroscience and in the Lieber Institute for Brain Development.