MRC Non-clinical Research professorship

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The SGDP Centre was founded in 1994 with the aid of an MRC programme grant and core support was renewed under the new MRC regulations for Centres in 2000. The Centre?s aim is to undertake research on the interplay between genetic, environmental and maturational factors, and their roles in the origins and course of multifactorial mental disorders. To this end the Centre has successfully recruited an unusually broad range of experts (e.g. from psychiatry, social, developmental and cognitive psychology, molecular genetics, quantitative genetics) and facilitated their working together. The existence of the Centre has made possible a wide range of collaborative studies across diverse scientific disciplines that would not otherwise have occurred.The Centre is a partnership between the MRC and Institute of Psychiatry, King?s College London which has made a major investment in the Centre covering approximately 88% of senior salaries and a substantial proportion of administrative and technical staff costs. We have attracted #41.7 million of grants in the past 5 years and hold current grants of #26.3 million of which the Centre grant accounts for just over 3% of the total. Although MRC core funding is a small proportion of total funding, such infrastructural support is not available from any other source, and it has been vital to the growth and cohesion of the Centre. Grant income has increased by 62% - nearly all of this from non-MRC sources - and the total number of staff has increased by 74% ( to 160) over the past 5 years. All staff are now housed under one roof in a new #15-million building following a successful bid to the Joint Infrastructure Fund.The Centre has been highly productive in researching three broad groups of common disorders: externalising disorders, mood disorders and disorders of cognition. Some key findings are listed in chapter 3 and include the first demonstrations of interactions between specific genotypes (functional polymorphisms) and measured environments in the pathogenesis of psychiatric problems.