Joel Gelernter MD

Joel Gelernter, MD, is Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics and Neurobiology; and Director, Division of Human Genetics (Psychiatry), at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Gelernter co-chairs the Substance Use Disorder (SUD) group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). She completed his Doctor of Medicine at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Bachelor of Science at Yale University. The research focus of his laboratory is the genetics of psychiatric illness – phenotypes including cocaine, opioid, nicotine, cannabis, and alcohol dependence, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and panic and other anxiety disorders. He also studies a range of intermediate phenotypes, such as neuroimaging measures; and basic issues in population and complex trait genetics. The overall approach involves the study of genetic polymorphism and sequence variation, on a molecular level and from the perspective of population genetics. Dr. Gelernter’s laboratory published genomewide association studies (GWAS) for cocaine and opioid dependence, PTSD, alcohol dependence, nicotine dependence, and several related traits. All of these studies have resulted in the identification of novel risk loci.