Fellow

Anita Thapar is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Cardiff University. She found a significant association between the prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and attention deficit disorder (ADHD) symptoms, she used a quantitative twin strategy to show that a shared genetic liability underlies ADHD, she found that the genotype association was mediated by impaired social understanding, and that the rate of large CNVs in individual with ADHD was significantly increased in loci previously reported for both autism and schizophrenia. She showed that the heritability of depression in adolescence was greater than that in childhood and that there were genetic influences on the risk of exposure to adverse life events.