Dr. Gerome Breen Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK

Gerome Breen is a Research Fellow/Lecturer at the MRC SGDP Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry (with strong ties to the Division of Psychological Medicine). He obtained his degree in Industrial Biochemistry from the University of Limerick in 1995 and then moved to the University of Aberdeen to do firstly... read morean MSc in Medical Molecular Genetics (1995-1996), then a PhD in schizophrenia genetics. After this, he was a Royal College of Physicians funded Sim Research Fellow, split between the University of Aberdeen and the Institute of Psychiatry. Over the last two years, in collaboration with others, he has constructed a novel database of length polymorphisms in the human genome. He was promoted to Research Fellow with Status of Lecturer in July 2003, and, in July 2004, was awarded an MRC Bioinformatics and Neuroinformatics Training Fellowship to allow him to expand his knowledge base and work in bioinformatics. His lab work focuses on the identification of functional polymorphisms in neurotransmitter and related pathways, particularly those involved in addiction and psychosis. This has resulted in important, ground-breaking publications on the genetics of cocaine addiction. Dr. Breen is a founding member of the International Tandem Repeat Consortium and was a principle organiser of "Microsat2005: The 1st Annual Workshop on the Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics of Microsatellites and VNTRs" held at King's College London (http://www.microsatellites.org).