Pamela Sklar facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Pamela Sklar
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| Born | July 20, 1959 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
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| Died | November 20, 2017 (aged 58) |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | St. John's College Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience Genomics Psychiatry |
| Institutions | Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai |
Pamela Sklar (born July 20, 1959 in Baltimore, Maryland - died November 20, 2017 in New York City) was an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist. She was Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetic and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was also chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Sklar is known for her large-scale gene discovery studies in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and for making some of the first statistically meaningful gene identifications in both mental illnesses.
Education
Sklar completed her bachelor's degree in classics and philosophy at St. John's College in 1981. She went on to complete her MD and then her PhD in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She carried out her residency in psychiatry at Columbia University Medical School, where she also carried out postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Richard Axel.
Research
Sklar's research and clinical work focused on characterizing the biology underlying mental illnesses, in particular schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Her studies of DNA variation have identified both common and rare genetic changes associated with these disorders. While working at the Broad Institute, Sklar co-founded the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and served as its genetics director. By studying thousands of affected individuals and comparing them with thousands of healthy people, she was the first to associate recurrent large deletions of DNA with the onset of schizophrenia and also found the first broadly reproducible genetic variants in schizophrenia as well as bipolar disorder using genome-wide association studies. Sklar and her colleagues discovered a molecular basis for polygenicity in schizophrenia among both rare and common DNA alterations and that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are genetically linked through DNA variants that contribute to both illnesses. In 2011, Sklar joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and became founding chief of the Division of Psychiatric Genomics there. The division's scope includes stem cell biology, neurocognition, statistical genetics, and imaging approaches to elucidate the biological variation causing mental illness. While at Mount Sinai, Sklar published papers demonstrating that schizophrenia is linked to many ultra-rare genetic variants. Sklar served as a principal investigator for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the largest international collaboration in the psychiatric community. She helped lead the consortium's working group on bipolar disorder. She also co-founded the International Schizophrenia Consortium. After she died, Icahn School of Medicine renamed their Division of Psychiatric Genomics in her honor.
Sklar edited the textbook Neurobiology of Mental Illness, and published more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2013.
Obituaries
