Curriculum Vitae#

Roel Ophoff (1970) obtained a MSc degree in Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University and he subsequently obtained his Ph.D. degree (cum laude) in human genetics of familial migraine at Leiden University in 1997. His thesis work resulted in the discovery of the first human gene for migraine, the alpha1A subunit of a voltage-gated calcium channel. He continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California in San Francisco, where his interest focused on the genetic mapping of bipolar disorder in a population isolate. In 2000 he returned to Leiden University as a senior researcher but transitioned later that year to the University of California Los Angeles as a research scientist to help establish the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. He continued his research of migraine genetics as well as studies of the genetic architecture of psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His research focused on genome-wide approaches of genetic mapping and genomic variation.



In 2005, Dr. Ophoff returned to The Netherlands (Utrecht University Medical Center) to establish and lead genetic studies of psychiatric and neurogenetic disorders. Has was appointed full professor in 2009. A major effort at this time was the establishment of a large bipolar cohort for genetic and clinical studies. He combined academic appointments at Utrecht University and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) until 2018, when he switched to Erasmus University Rotterdam and UCLA. His current research is devoted to the genetic and genomic architecture of neuropsychiatric disorders with integration of epigenetic and transcriptomic approaches to decipher molecular mechanisms associated with disease susceptibility. He is also directing a predoctoral and postdoctoral training program in Neurobehavioral Genetics and is the associate director of Bioinformatics Graduate Program at UCLA.



Dr. Ophoff has authored more than 400 original publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and he has an h-index of 140 according to Google scholar. He is actively involved in large-scale consortium studies of the genetics of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and related neurobehavioral phenotypes.