Pamela Sklar

Pamela Sklar is a neuroscientist, human geneticist and clinical psychiatrist investigating the genetic causes of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A major focus of her work at the Broad Institute is to identify susceptibility genes for psychiatric diseases by applying tools developed for understanding and characterizing human sequence variation.

She is a founding member of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and serves as director of genetics for the Stanley Center. Pamela has long been involved in a leadership position for genetic studies of bipolar disorder through the Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD) network and has completed genome-wide association analyses in bipolar disorder. More recently, Pamela has organized and is leading an International Schizophrenia Consortium that has completed a genome-wide study of schizophrenia.

Her work has made substantial contributions to the understanding of gene variants and structural variants that influence the risk of bipolar disorder and autism.

Pamela's primary laboratory is located in the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU) in the Center for Human Genetics Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is the associate director of the PNGU. She is also associate professor of psychiatry and adjunct associate professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, as well as attending physician in the psychiatry department at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Pamela earned her B.A. in classics and philosophy from St. John's College. She received an M.D. and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins Medical School. She completed clinical training in psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan and postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Richard Axel (Columbia University).