Dr Jonathan Coleman joined the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in 2012 as a 1+3 MSc+PhD student, supervised by Professor Thalia Eley and Professor Gerome Breen. Following the completion of his PhD, he joined Professor Breen’s research group as a postdoctoral researcher, before establishing his own research group in 2020.

Dr Coleman is a statistical geneticist with a background in biological sciences. The Coleman Research Group applies methods from statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology to study psychiatric disorders, particularly common mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety and eating disorders. They are particularly interested in using statistical genetic methods to gain biological insights that can be translated into experimentally testable hypotheses, and in integrating environmental and genetic information to understand mental health.

Dr Coleman works extensively with international collaborators in the Psychiatric Genetics Consortium, leading a work package for the post-traumatic stress disorder group, supervising analyses for the eating disorders group, and contributing analyses to large-scale meta-analyses of major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and others.

He also co-leads the MSc in Developmental Psychiatry and Psychopathology alongside Dr Vahestha Sethna.

Qualifications:

• BA (promoted to MA), University of Cambridge  
• MSc, King’s College London 
• PhD, King’s College London

Research interests

• Obtaining biological insight from genome-wide association studies in psychiatry: Fine-mapping in major depressive disorder; Annotating genetic variants with biological actions in the brain
• The role of environmental context in psychiatric genetics: Genetic associations in the context of trauma exposure; The genetics of post-traumatic stress disorder
• The shared and distinct genetics of mental disorders: Methodological approaches to distinguishing between post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.
• Statistical genomics
• Bioinformatics

Teaching

• Programme co-lead, MSc Developmental Psychology and Psychopathology.
• Module co-lead, Nature and Nurture II: Genomic Approaches in Psychopathology.
• Lectures on the primary and secondary analysis of genome-wide genotype data.

Expertise and public engagement

• Active social media presence, particularly in reportage of scientific conferences.