Rate My Professor Edwin Van den Oord

Edwin J. C. G. Van den Oord, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy and Co-Director of the Center for Biomarker Research and Precision Medicine, which he founded in 2006. He earned his Ph.D. from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1993 and was trained in applied statistics and psychiatric genetics. His research develops and applies novel statistical and computational methods, implemented in user-friendly software for high-performance computing clusters, to identify biomarkers that improve disease understanding and personalize treatments by matching patients to the most effective and safe medications. Main applications focus on substance use disorders such as alcohol use disorder and adolescent cannabis use disorder, and psychiatric conditions including autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and suicide.

Under his leadership, the center has secured over $30 million in grants, primarily from the National Institutes of Health, to advance genomic technologies and multidisciplinary approaches alleviating mental illness and addiction burdens. Key ongoing projects encompass methylation markers predicting chronic depression and childhood adversity health consequences, optimized whole methylome studies in brain tissue, data integration, biomarkers forecasting responses to mental disorder medications, large-scale single-cell studies identifying drug targets, AI-based computational drug discovery screening compounds, and brain-derived extracellular vesicles as next-generation biomarkers for enhanced diagnosis, risk prediction, and prevention.