Dr Radhika Kandaswamy is Research Associate in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at King's. She completed her PhD at UCL in the Department of Molecular Psychiatry under the supervision of Professor Hugh Gurling, working on the molecular genetics of bipolar disorder. Following her PhD, she went on to work as a Postdoctoral training fellow at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton with Professor Richard Houlston on characterising susceptibility genes for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. She also had the opportunity to learn chromosome conformation capture techniques such as Hi-C, 4C and 3C and study the long-range interactions between loci regulating the transcriptome.

At the SGDP Centre, she worked with Dr Chloe Wong on the Environmental-Risk (E-Risk) study, assessing the impact of psychosocial stress during adolescence on the DNA methylome of MZ twins. She has now joined the TEDS team and will be exploring the gene-environment interactions in relation to alcohol as a phenotype. She is part of the East London Genes & Health Brain Consortium.

Research interests

• Genetics 
• Epigenetics 
• Mental health 

Teaching

Radhika has delivered tutorials and lectures on Molecular biology and epigenetics for the Master’s courses at SGDP Centre and the IoPPN. 

Expertise and public engagement

Radhika has participated in public engagement activities for raising awareness about genetics at local schools and at a MQ funded event.