Loes Olde Loohuis

Loes Olde Loohuis is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), affiliated with the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. She leads a research group focused on the genetics of severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, using computational approaches to analyze multi-level data including psychiatric phenotypes, health records, and molecular profiles.

• Academic Affiliation: UCLA (David Geffen School of Medicine), Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
• Research Focus: Molecular mechanisms of mental illness, EHR-based phenotyping, population genetics
• Affiliated Programs: Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics, Human Genetics, Computational Medicine, Bioinformatics PhD program

Her work emphasizes admixed populations in Colombia, Brazil, and the USA, with initiatives like the Misión Origen biobank (100,000 participants from Colombia's Paisa region). Funded by NIH, Amazon, BD2, and GP2, she co-chairs the Ancestral Population Network (APN) to advance global mental health equity. Recent research trends include transdiagnostic analysis, NLP for psychiatric phenotyping, and precision psychiatry using longitudinal EHR data. She has published extensively on topics like polygenic risk scoring, genetic architecture of mental disorders, and epigenetic aging in schizophrenia.