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Max Lam, Ph.D

As post-doctoral research scientist, both at The Zucker Hillside Hospital/Feinstein Institutes of Medical Research, and Stanley Center for Psychiatry Research/The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dr Lam played the role of the lead analyst and author of the project examining the genetic architecture of schizophrenia in East Asian populations, culminating in the Elliott Gershon Paper of the Year Award. A prestigious award in the field of psychiatric genetics.  At the same time, Dr Lam and his team worked to release the high throughput GWAS analytical pipeline “RICOPILI” with the hope of sharing the state-of-art tool for the benefit of the research community. In recent years, Dr Lam has taken a leadership role in cognitive genomics research. In this work, he demonstrated that shared biological pathways not only exist between psychiatric disorders and general cognitive ability; his recent work demonstrates that early neurodevelopmental processes and adult synaptic pruning mechanisms are genetically differentiable across psychopathological states. Additionally, he was able to leverage cognitive genomics (Large Scale GWAS + Transcriptomics) for nootropic drug repurposing and discovery, identifying serotoninergic, glutamatergic, carbonic anhydrases, and voltage-ion channel gene targets in his most recent projects.

Dr Lam has since completed his postdoctoral training in the United States and has recently returned to IMH. Moving forward, Dr Lam aims to develop new analytical approaches that allow the convergence of multi-faceted databases for nootropic drug discovery and population/patient level segmentation and stratification towards the goal of precision psychiatry.