Dr Vivek Benegal works in addiction medicine and the genetics of psychiatric disorders. He is interested in developmental behaviour, especially drug abuse and high risk behaviour in street and working children. He is also interested in child development issues and the use of developmentally appropriate aids for children’s education and recreation. He conducts drug abuse awareness programmes and life skills training for children in schools and colleges. He has developed a drug awareness module in comic book form. He is involved in the epidemiological assessment of and intervention in drug use and high risk sexual behaviour among street and working children. He has a diploma in communications in film and theatre, and has experience in theatre and documentary cinema. He has made three films, and educational slide shows, and he is interested in theatre and cinema for children.
Dr Eesha Sharma did her MD in Psychiatry at NIMHANS, Bangalore, being awarded the Best Outgoing Student for 2012. Thereafter she worked as a Senior Resident, and did a Post Doctoral Fellowship in Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders at NIMHANS. She has been a faculty member, as Lecturer/Assistant Professor at Department of Psychiatry, King George’s Medical University, Lucknow, since August 2013. Eesha has published her research work in prestigious journals like The Lancet, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, and The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. She has published 18 articles in peer-reviewed journals, written 6 book chapters, presented her work in national and international conferences, and has delivered guest lectures. At King George’s Medical University, Eesha has supervised MD Psychiatry and MPhil Clinical Psychology students.
Bharath Holla is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, India. He completed postgraduate residency in psychiatry and post-doctoral fellowship in addiction medicine at NIMHANS. He is a co-investigator in the Consortium on the Vulnerability to Externalizing Disorders and Addictions (c-VEDA) and Accelerator program for Discovery in Brain disorders using Stem cells (ADBS). He is interested in bridging imaging and genomics to understand the developmental underpinnings of mental illness.
Dr Meera Purushottam is senior geneticist at the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at NIMHANS where the focus has been the genetic basis and correlates of psychiatric and neurological diseases. The laboratory is the testing ground for many clinicians who base their post graduate and doctoral thesis dissertations on wet lab experiments carried out under her supervision. Her work has focused on trying to understand the influence of gene variants on disease presentation and response to drugs.
Cells derived from patients have been used to unravel disease mechanisms better, while whole exome studies have helped to identify rare risk variants in severe mental illness in patients. She is in charge of genetic testing for early onset neuromuscular and late onset movement disorders. She is interested in understanding the biological implications of genetic variants at the level of the patient, the tissue and the cell. The effect of the environment on the DNA methylome is an area of specific interest.
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