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Adrianna Kepinska BSc MSc PhD AKC AFHEA

Dr Adrianna Kepinska

(they/them)

BSc MSc PhD AKC AFHEA

Teams and roles for Adrianna Kepinska

Overview

I am a psychiatric geneticist, interested in how mental illness unfolds across a lifetime.

Psychiatric conditions co-occur and change across childhood, adolescence, pregnancy, and later life, yet we mostly study them as isolated diagnoses, captured at a single moment. My work uses national registers, birth cohorts, and genomic data to follow these trajectories instead, asking what genetic variation can tell us about who develops which combination of conditions, when, and what happens next.

I completed my PhD in Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London, working on genetics of schizophrenia across the lifespan. Then, I worked for four years at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City on genetics of postpartum psychosis and developing phenome-wide studies (which predict multiple conditions at once). At Cardiff, I work on the genetics of avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, a feeding disorder which co-occurs with multiple psychiatric and neurodevelopmental symptoms.

Biography

2026 – present: Cardiff University
I joined Cardiff University in July 2026 as a Research Associate, working with a new eating disorders consortium on the genetics of avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. My work here draws on rare variant genomic data to characterise ARFID's genetic architecture and its overlap with neurodevelopmental conditions.

2022 – 2026: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
As a postdoctoral fellow, I led genetic and epidemiological studies of psychiatric comorbidity across the lifespan, including Swedish national registers and US longitudinal cohorts including the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study of a diverse paediatric population. This included family-based and rare variant analyses of postpartum psychosis, a meta-analysis of parental prenatal mood and anxiety disorders in relation to autism and ADHD in children, and register-based work on genetics of autoimmune exposures, and their link to autism and ADHD. Much of this was carried out through collaborations with the Karolinska Institutet and Aarhus University, which gave me sustained experience of Nordic register-based research. I also contributed to the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium's Video Training Textbook, a free and open educational resource for teaching psychiatric genetics computing and statistics, and reviewed for journals including the American Journal of Psychiatry.

2017 – 2022: King's College London
I completed my PhD in Genetic Epidemiology, focusing on the genetic basis of symptom variation in schizophrenia symptoms, including age of onset, duration of untreated psychosis, and cognitive decline in old age.

Honours and awards

  • 2024 — Seaver Foundation Fellowship (principal investigator), The Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, New York
  • 2024 — Finalist, Young Investigators Competition, Mindich Child Health and Development Institute Annual Retreat, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
  • 2023 — Out to Innovate™ Career Development Fellowship (principal investigator), Out to Innovate™, Pasadena
  • 2023 — Postdoctoral Travel Award, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
  • 2023 — Professional Development Scholarship, Skills for Health and Research Professionals, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
  • 2020 — Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, Advance HE
  • 2019 — Credibility in Neuroscience bursary, British Neuroscience Association
  • 2018 — Associateship of King's College London (philosophy and theology academic award)
  • 2018 — Stanley Foundation stipend, Workshop on Schizophrenia & Related Disorders, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  • 2017 — NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre full PhD studentship, King's College London
  • 2015 — Mary Holdsworth Travelling Fund and Valerie Clark Fund travel bursaries, St Mary's College Society, Durham University

Committees and reviewing

Journal peer reviewer: American Journal of Psychiatry, Genomic Psychiatry, Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Wellcome Open Research, Scientific Reports

Contact Details

Email [email protected]

Campuses Hadyn Ellis Building, Floor 2, Room 2.01, Maindy Road, Cardiff, CF24 4HQ

Research themes

Specialisms

  • Psychiatric Genetics
  • Psychiatric disorders
  • Bioinformatics

External profiles