Andrew Schork

Andrew Schork is a research leader at the Institute for Biological Psychiatry, Copenhagen University Hospital and an Associate Professor at the GLOBE Institute, Copenhagen University. He is a human geneticist interested in the etiology of complex disease, especially psychiatric disorders. The Schork lab combines Danish national healthcare data and other large biobank resources with tools from quantitative genetics to identify, characterize, and deploy genetic risk factors in service of improving our understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders. This research works to advance study design, analysis, and methods that can make sense of the especially complex, multifactorial, heterogeneous etiology of psychiatric disorders. In particular, these disorders receive small contributions from thousands of genetic variants (i.e., polygenes) and a key research challenge is modeling their joint effect for predictions, to identify disrupted biological processes, and for evolutionary signatures. Schork completed his Ph.D. studies at UC San Diego in 2016 with a degree in Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Anthropogeny, where he was an Annette Merle-Smith CARTA Fellow. He now lives and works in Copenhagen, having grown his research group thanks to generous funding from Lundbeckfonden.