Authors
Frans Henskens (University of Newcastle), Vaughan Carr (University of NSW), and Stanley Catts (University of Queensland)
Abstract
Schizophrenia, one of the most severe of mental illnesses, is characterized by complex clinical symptoms, cognitive deficits, and subtle structural brain changes that are only evident with sophisticated image analysis techniques. Twin, adoption and family studies suggest that there is a genetic contribution to the development of the disorder, but the physiological causes of schizophrenia are largely unknown. With a prevalence of 4 per 1,000, significant advances in the genetics of schizophrenia have been limited by the difficulty in achieving sufficiently large samples of patients and case-matched unaffected individuals, who have been well characterised in terms of clinical, cognitive and neuro-anatomical evaluations.
To overcome this limitation, a national coalition of researchers led by scientists based at the University of Newcastle and with the support of an NHMRC Enabling Grant is establishing the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank (ASRB). This initiative is collecting clinical and cognitive assessments, genetic data and MRI brain scans in 4,000 individuals from NSW, VIC, QLD and WA: 2,000 subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia, and 2,000 healthy controls matched for age, gender and ethnic profile. This will enable research questions that require large sample sizes to be addressed by Australian researchers, particularly those who would not normally have ready access to clinical populations.
About the speaker
Frans Henskens was educated at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and was awarded his PhD in 1991. He has worked at the University of Sydney, and the University of Newcastle where he is Associate Professor of Computer Science.
In 2002 he visited Ulm, Germany, under the Baden-Württemberg Visiting Scholars Programme. Frans' research interests centre on engineering of flexible software systems, bioinformatics, operating systems and computer forensics, distributed and grid computing, resilience and availability in database systems, and use of persistent stores for bulk data storage and manipulation. In 2007 he received the Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Australian College of Educators NSW Quality Teaching Award.