James Knowles, Ph.D.

Dr. Knowles previously served at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences in Brooklyn, New York, as Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell Biology, and as Deputy Director of the Institute for Genomic Health. He is a board-certified psychiatrist and a psychiatric geneticist with significant experience in large-scale collaborations. His early research resulted in the discovery of the genes for two inherited disorders, renitis pigmentosa and primary pulmonary hypertension, but most of his work has been on the genetics of complex psychiatric disorders with major genetic components, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, nicotine and opiate addiction, early-onset depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was co-leader of the first genome-wide association study of obsessive-compulsive disorder and a co-investigator of the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort. He is a key collaborator in several international collaborations such as the BrainSpan project, the PsychENCODE Consortium, and the Whole Genome Sequencing of Psychiatric Disorders Consortium. Dr. Knowles has published more than 250 peer-reviewed studies in the areas of genetics, epigenetics, transcriptomics, brain development, neuroscience, and psychiatry.