News, November 21, 2016 – Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC)

14^th Annual CBC Symposium

“Genetics of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders”

DATE: Friday, November 11, 2016
TIME: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
LOCATION: The University of Chicago
Ida Noyes Hall
1212 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637

Symposium Recap

Recognizing the Significance of Genetics in Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders

November 21, 2015

The 14^th Annual CBC Symposium, “Genetics of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders,” took place on Friday, November 11, 2016, in Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago campus. This year’s symposium was organized by the leaders of the CBC Lever Award-funded Conte Center for Computational Neuropsychiatric Genomics: Ed Cook (UIC), Rick Morimoto (NU) and Andrey Rzhetsky (UChicago).

Over 150 students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, staff and research scientists from the Chicago area attended the symposium. Organizers of the symposium invited six exceptional speakers: Nancy Cox (Vanderbilt), Mark Daly (Broad Institute), Dan Geschwind (UCLA), Chunyu Liu (UIC), Peter Penzes (NU) and Barbara Stranger (UChicago). The speakers presented a variety of data elucidating the genetic architecture of neuropsychiatric diseases such as autism, schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Special emphasis was put on “big data” that is increasingly available to researchers, including the genotypes of thousands of people, in both the US and the world, with a history of psychiatric diseases. Such massive genetic data depositories allow the scientists to perform unprecedented correlation analyses of disease prevalence, the first step towards the ultimate genetic dissection of the specific phenotypes. The future of genomics-based research and the promise of personalized medicine were also discussed. Each talk triggered a lively Q&A session.

The all-day symposium included an interactive poster session. An end-of-the-day reception provided further networking opportunities to forge new potential collaborations between the attending scientists. The CBC received many compliments for organizing yet another first class event, timely in topic and accessible to all scientists in Chicago.