Profile
Loes Olde Loohuis is Assistant Professor-in-Residence in Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Her research focuses on elucidating the underlying molecular mechanisms of severe mental illness, by utilizing and developing computational approaches to leverage multi-level data. Prior to joining UCLA as faculty she was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics, during which time she was awarded a K99/R00 award to identify electronic health record and genetic signatures that predict which patients with depression will develop bipolar disorder.
Her UCLA lab aims to characterize and predict psychiatric disease trajectories using genetic and high-dimensional phenotypic data resources, especially electronic health records. Her lab has a focus on studying Latin American populations and the identification of genetic and environmental risk factors that contribute to the cause and course of illness in these admixed populations. To this end, she is co-leading the development of an NIMH funded biobank for Severe Mental Illness, Misión Origen, consisting of 100,000 participants from the Paisa region of Colombia. Dr. Olde Loohuis is also part of Populations Underrepresented in Mental illness Association Studies (PUMAS), a recently formed international collaboration of investigators from the US, South America and Africa which, through whole genome sequencing, aims to elucidate the genetics of severe mental illness across diverse ancestries and environments.
Dr. Olde Loohuis earned a PhD in Computer Science from CUNY Graduate Center under the supervision of Dr. Bud Mishra (from New York University).
@loldeloo