Andrew Grotzinger
|
Associate Professor |
| Office: SP3011 |
| Phone: 709-864-3504 |
| Email: agrotzinger@mun.ca |
| Google Scholar: |
| Affiliations: Clinical |
Background
I completed my doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and pre-doctoral residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School on the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) track. Prior to joining 91´«Ã½, I was an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG) and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2021 to 2026.
Research Focus
My research program involves developing multivariate methods to better understand shared and unique genetic signal across psychiatric disorder. This work is clinically motivated by the observation that comorbidity is the norm rather than the exception, where most individuals will present with multiple disorders in their lifetime. Unsurprisingly, this comorbidity is reflected in our genetic code, with the majority of genetic signal shared across disorders. This indicates that a comprehensive picture of psychiatric risk can only be obtained by bringing together multiple disorders in statistical models that can formally parse shared versus disorder-specific pathways. A unique advantage of these methods is that they can include rare, or even mutually exclusive disorders, within the same statistical model. This is made possible by the fact that even independent participant datasets can be linked together via our DNA.
The translational potential of this work includes the ability to: (i) identify pharmacological interventions for comorbid presentations, (ii) refine a diagnostic framework that currently results in exceedingly high comorbidity rates, and (iii) produce more complete genetic models that formally consider high levels of risk sharing across disorders. Recent projects from students I’ve supervised include examining shared genetic risk between psychiatric disorders and other medical conditions (e.g., immune-mediated diseases), evaluating the divergent genetic validity of diagnostic subtypes within a disorder, and investigating whether individuals with early versus late onset versions of the same disorder show distinct genetic risk profiles.
In addition to serving as principal investigator of the Psychiatric Genetics lab, I am core faculty for the International Statistical Genetics (ISG) workshop and co-chair of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) An up-to-date list of my work can be found on my Google Scholar page:
Selected Publications
(bold indicates supervised student or postdoctoral author)
Grotzinger, A.D., Werme, J., Peyrout, W.J., Frei, O., … Kendler, K.S., & Smoller, J.W. (2026). Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders. Nature.
Lawrence, J.M., Foote, I.F., Breunig, S., Schaffer, L.S., Tallis, C.B., Mallard, T.T., Grotzinger, A.D. (2026). Shared genetic liability across clusters of psychiatric and physical illness. Nature Communications.
Foote, I.F., Flint, J.P., Fürtjes, A.E., Mullin, D.S., Fisk, J.D., Karakach, T.K., Rutenberg, A., … Grotzinger. A.D. (2025). Uncovering the multivariate genetic architecture of frailty with genomic structural equation modeling. Nature Genetics.
Breunig, S., Lee, H.L., Karlson, E.W., Krishnan, A., Lawrence, J.M., Schaffer, L., Grotzinger, A.D. (2025). Examining the genetic links between clusters of immune-mediated diseases and psychiatric disorders. Translational Psychiatry.
Breunig, S., Lawrence, J.M., Foote, I.F., Gebhardt, H.J., Wilcutt, E.G., Grotzinger, A.D. (2024). Examining differences in the genetic and functional architecture of ADHD diagnosed in childhood and adulthood. Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. https://doi.org/
Schaffer, L.S., Breunig, S., Lawrence, J.M., Foote, I.F., Grotzinger, A.D. (2024). Characterizing genetic pathways unique to autism spectrum disorder at multiple levels of biological analysis. Molecular Autism.
Lawrence, J.M., Breunig, S., Foote, I.F., Tallis, C.B., & Grotzinger, A.D. (2023). Genomic SEM applied to explore etiological differences in bipolar subtypes. Psychological Medicine. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0033291723002957
Grotzinger, A.D., Singh, K, Miller-Fleming, T.W., Lam, M., Mallard, T.M., Chen, Y., Liu, Z., Ge, T., Smoller, J.W. (2023). Transcriptome-wide structural equation modeling of 13 major psychiatric disorders for cross-disorder risk and drug repurposing. JAMA Psychiatry.
Grotzinger, A.D., Mallard, T.M., Liu, Z., Seidlitz, J., Ge, T., Smoller, J.W. (2023). Multivariate genomic architecture of cortical thickness and surface area at multiple levels of analysis. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36605-x
Grotzinger, A.D., Keller, M.C. (2022). Potential bias in genetic correlations. Science.
Grotzinger, A.D., Mallard, T.T., Akingbuwa, W.A., Ip, H.F., Adams, M.J., Lewis, C.M., McIntosh, A.M., Grove, J., … Tucker-Drob, E.M., Nivard, M.G. (2022). Genetic architecture of 11 major psychiatric disorders at biobehavioral, functional, and molecular genetic levels of analysis. Nature Genetics.
Grotzinger, A.D., de la Fuente, J., Davies, G., Nivard, M.G., Tucker-Drob, E.M. (2022). Transcriptome-wide and stratified genomic structural equation modeling identify neurobiological pathways underlying general and specific cognitive functions. Nature Communications.
Grotzinger, A.D., de la Fuente, J., Prive, F., Nivard, M.G., Tucker-Drob, E.M. (2023). Pervasive downward bias in estimates of liability scale heritability in GWAS meta-analysis: A simple solution. Biological Psychiatry. https://doi.org/
Grotzinger, A.D. (2021). Shared genetic architecture across psychiatric disorders. Psychological Medicine.
Grotzinger, A.D., Rhemtulla, M., de Vlaming, R., Ritchie, S.J., Mallard, T.M., Hill, W.D., … Tucker-Drob, E.M. (2019). Genomic structural equation modeling provides insights into the multivariate genetic architecture of complex traits. Nature Human Behaviour.