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After graduating from the Institute of Psychiatry, London with a PhD in the genetics of schizophrenia in 2005, I moved to Toronto, Canada where I was awarded a University of Toronto Postdoctoral Fellowship to examine functional variation in genes related to stress in the aetiology of childhood onset mood disorders. After ~3 years, family circumstances brought me back to London, where I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a pan-European study investigating the role of genetic factors in the etiology of addiction. On returning from my first maternity leave (April 2009), I secured funding to work in the new Psychiatric Epigenetics group at the Institute of Psychiatry. I was most recently involved in the first methylomic profiling of monozygotic twins discordant for a psychiatric disorder which we identified reproducible epigenetic changes from the affected twins.

I have received several prestigious awards during my research training including a MRC PhD studentship, a University of Toronto Postdoctoral Fellowship, and several Young Investigator Awards from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. My research has been published in several high-impact journals (including Archives of General Psychiatry, The American Journal of Human Genetics, and The American Journal of Psychiatry). To date, my PhD and postdoctoral research has primarily focussed on the analysis of functional genetic variants in psychiatric disorders. Whilst this approach has uncovered genetic risks for mental illness, discoveries in the field are often characterized by non-replication, small effect sizes, and significant heterogeneity. My current research aim is to move beyond these traditional aetiological approaches and test the hypothesis that epigenetic phenomena play a crucial role in the development of psychiatric disorders.

Publications

Xie, W., Barr, C.L., Kim, A., Yue, F., Lee, A.Y., Eubanks, J., Dempster, E.L., and Ren, B. (2012). Base-resolution analyses of sequence and parent-of-origin dependent DNA methylation in the mouse genome. Cell 148, 816-831.

Pidsley, R., Dempster, E., Troakes, C., Al-Sarraj, S., and Mill, J. (2012). Epigenetic and genetic variation at the IGF2/H19 imprinting control region on 11p15.5 is associated with cerebellum weight. Epigenetics 7, 155-163.

Clarke, T.K., Dempster, E., Docherty, S.J., Desrivieres, S., Lourdsamy, A., Wodarz, N., Ridinger, M., Maier, W., Rietschel, M., and Schumann, G. (2012). Multiple polymorphisms in genes of the adrenergic stress system confer vulnerability to alcohol abuse. Addict Biol 17, 202-208.

Ingason, A., Kirov, G., Giegling, I., Hansen, T., Isles, A.R., Jakobsen, K.D., Kristinsson, K.T., le Roux, L., Gustafsson, O., Craddock, N., et al. (2011). Maternally derived microduplications at 15q11-q13: implication of imprinted genes in psychotic illness. Am J Psychiatry 168, 408-417.

Dempster, E.L., Pidsley, R., Schalkwyk, L.C., Owens, S., Georgiades, A., Kane, F., Kalidindi, S., Picchioni, M., Kravariti, E., Toulopoulou, T., et al. (2011). Disease-associated epigenetic changes in monozygotic twins discordant for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Hum Mol Genet 20, 4786-4796.

Schalkwyk, L.C., Meaburn, E.L., Smith, R., Dempster, E.L., Jeffries, A.R., Davies, M.N., Plomin, R., and Mill, J. (2010). Allelic skewing of DNA methylation is widespread across the genome. Am J Hum Genet 86, 196-212.

Pidsley, R., Dempster, E.L., and Mill, J. (2010). Brain weight in males is correlated with DNA methylation at IGF2. Mol Psychiatry 15, 880-881.

Dempster, E.L., Kiss, E., Kapornai, K., Daroczi, G., Mayer, L., Baji, I., Tamas, Z., Gadoros, J., Kennedy, J.L., Vetro, A., et al. (2010). No evidence of an association between two genes, EDN1 and ACE, and childhood-onset mood disorders. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 153B, 341-346.

Dutt, A., McDonald, C., Dempster, E., Prata, D., Shaikh, M., Williams, I., Schulze, K., Marshall, N., Walshe, M., Allin, M., et al. (2009). The effect of COMT, BDNF, 5-HTT, NRG1 and DTNBP1 genes on hippocampal and lateral ventricular volume in psychosis. Psychol Med 39, 1783-1797.

Bramon, E., Dempster, E., Frangou, S., Shaikh, M., Walshe, M., Filbey, F.M., McDonald, C., Sham, P., Collier, D.A., and Murray, R. (2008). Neuregulin-1 and the P300 waveform--a preliminary association study using a psychosis endophenotype. Schizophr Res 103, 178-185.

Dempster, E.L., Kiss, E., Kapornai, K., Daroczy, G., Mayer, L., Baji, I., Tamas, Z., Gadoros, J., Kennedy, J.L., Vetro, A., et al. (2007). No evidence of association between a functional polymorphism in the MTHFR gene and childhood-onset mood disorders. Mol Psychiatry 12, 1063-1064.

Dempster, E.L., Burcescu, I., Wigg, K., Kiss, E., Baji, I., Gadoros, J., Tamas, Z., Kennedy, J.L., Vetro, A., Kovacs, M., et al. (2007). Evidence of an association between the vasopressin V1b receptor gene (AVPR1B) and childhood-onset mood disorders. Arch Gen Psychiatry 64, 1189-1195.

Mill, J., Dempster, E., Caspi, A., Williams, B., Moffitt, T., and Craig, I. (2006). Evidence for monozygotic twin (MZ) discordance in methylation level at two CpG sites in the promoter region of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 141B, 421-425.

Fernandes, C., Hoyle, E., Dempster, E., Schalkwyk, L.C., and Collier, D.A. (2006). Performance deficit of alpha7 nicotinic receptor knockout mice in a delayed matching-to-place task suggests a mild impairment of working/episodic-like memory. Genes Brain Behav 5, 433-440.

Dempster, E.L., Toulopoulou, T., McDonald, C., Bramon, E., Walshe, M., Wickham, H., Sham, P.C., Murray, R.M., and Collier, D.A. (2006). Episodic memory performance predicted by the 2bp deletion in exon 6 of the "alpha 7-like" nicotinic receptor subunit gene. Am J Psychiatry 163, 1832-1834.

Dempster, E.L., Mill, J., Craig, I.W., and Collier, D.A. (2006). The quantification of COMT mRNA in post mortem cerebellum tissue: diagnosis, genotype, methylation and expression. BMC Med Genet 7, 10.

Bramon, E., Dempster, E., Frangou, S., McDonald, C., Schoenberg, P., MacCabe, J.H., Walshe, M., Sham, P., Collier, D., and Murray, R.M. (2006). Is there an association between the COMT gene and P300 endophenotypes? Eur Psychiatry 21, 70-73.

Dempster, E., Toulopoulou, T., McDonald, C., Bramon, E., Walshe, M., Filbey, F., Wickham, H., Sham, P.C., Murray, R.M., and Collier, D.A. (2005). Association between BDNF val66 met genotype and episodic memory. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 134B, 73-75.

Dempster, E.L., Pryor, K.V., Francis, D., Young, J.E., and Rogers, H.J. (1999). Rapid DNA extraction from ferns for PCR-based analyses. Biotechniques 27, 66-68.

Emma Dempster

Post-Doctoral Research Worker

Publications