Jennifer Forsyth, PhD

Jennifer is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence in Psychiatry at UCLA. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at UCLA, with a minor in Neuroscience, in 2016. She is interested in understanding how genetic risk variants interact with brain development to yield the broad phenotype associated with schizophrenia and related disorders. After completing her clinical psychology internship at the University of Pittsburgh Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Drs. Carrie Bearden and Giovanni Coppola, focused on leveraging functional genomics to identify convergent biological processes impacted by genetic risk for schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders, and to identify specific genes responsible for the increased risk for these disorders associated with 22q11.2 copy number variants (CNVs).