Rate My Professor Sathish Periyasamy

Dr. Sathish Periyasamy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Monash University, within the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health, and serves as an honorary research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland. Holding a BSc with First Class Honours, Postgraduate Diploma, MSc, and PhD, he brings over thirty years of computer programming expertise and fifteen years of experience in computational biology to his work in biomedicine. His academic background spans chemical, biological, and medical domains, enabling a focus on the interface between basic and clinical research to advance translational psychiatry. Dr. Periyasamy's research centers on systems/genomic medicine, exploring the mechanisms of pathophysiological processes in psychiatric disorders through systems genetics. He investigates genetic factors in schizophrenia, including rare variants, polygenic risk, and metabolic pathways such as niacin metabolism in diverse populations.

Dr. Periyasamy's career includes significant contributions at the Queensland Brain Institute and Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, where he served as a research fellow and Principal Investigator for NHMRC-funded projects. His key publications demonstrate substantial impact in psychiatric genetics, including 'Schizophrenia risk conferred by rare protein-truncating variants is concentrated in neurons in specific brain regions' (Nature Genetics, 2023), 'Mapping genomic loci implicates genes and synaptic biology in schizophrenia' (2022), 'Association of Schizophrenia Risk With Disordered Niacin Metabolism in an Indian Genome-wide Association Study' (JAMA Psychiatry, 2019), 'Genome-wide Association Studies in Schizophrenia' (book chapter), and 'Novel genes associated with colorectal cancer are revealed by high resolution cytogenetic analysis' (2013). With over 4,600 citations on ResearchGate, his work influences the field by integrating computational approaches with genomic data to uncover schizophrenia etiology. He supervises PhD and Masters students on projects like gene-based statistical epistasis in schizophrenia and rare variant associations in Indian families, fostering the next generation of researchers in psychiatric genomics.