Na Cai

Twitter: @caina89, Emails: caina89@gmail.com, na.cai@helmholtz-munich.de

ORCID: 0000-0001-7496-2075

CV, Google Scholar, Github

I am a quantitative geneticist studying the genetic basis of mental health disorders (specifically Major Depressive Disorder, MDD). I am currently a principal investigator at Helmholtz Pioneer Campus and Computational Health Centre at Helmholtz Munich. 

The objective of my lab’s research is to understand how genetic variants affect risk for neuropsychiatric diseases, either directly or in conjunction with physiological and external environments. We use computational and quantitative methods to interrogate large-scale genomic datasets for the effects of genetic variation on neuropsychiatric disease risk. In addition to finding statistical associations, we aim to elucidate the molecular pathways, tissue specificity, physiological context and environmental modulators behind them.

I studied Natural Sciences (Biological) at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and did my PhD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) and University of Oxford with Jonathan Flint. I then did my postdoctoral training at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL-EBI with Nicole Soranzo and Oliver Stegle, before coming to Helmholtz Munich to start my own group.

In terms of teaching, I am faculty in the Department of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich, and affiliate faculty in the Munich Data Science School (MUDS) and International Max Planck Research School for Translational Psychiatry (IMPRS-TP). I am also faculty at the Computational Genomics Summer Institute (CGSI) organised by UCLA. 

I am an active member of the MDD and Cross-Disorder Working Groups of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC-MDD, PGC-CDG), as well as the diagnostic committee for the Schizophrenia Working Group (PGC-SCZ). I am part of the programme committee for the World Congress in Psychiatric Genetics (WCPG) since 2022. I am also vice-chair of the 2023 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Quantitative Genetics and Genomics, and will be co-chairing the 2025 meeting (16-21 Feb 2025, save the date!).