The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia University seeks to catalyze the development of innovative new tools to enhance care for people experiencing severe mental illness worldwide, including advances in diagnosis, prevention, and treatment, through the application of precision psychiatry—an emerging field at the nexus of multiple scientific disciplines including genomics, neuroscience, and epidemiology. By allowing researchers to map the genetic mutations that underlie the psychiatric disorders of individual patients, precision psychiatry holds the unprecedented promise of highly effective personalized care based on each individual’s unique genetic makeup and biology.
The Center’s work will draw on complementary expertise at Columbia’s Department of Psychiatry, the New York Psychiatric Institute, and the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, as well the Columbia-affiliated New York Genome Center.
This partnership between Columbia University and SNF arose from a joint vision for helping to reduce the toll of mental illness on individuals and communities with cutting-edge science and technology. In keeping with the values of the SNF Health Initiative, the Center’s leadership is fully committed to making the resources it develops open and available to the international research community. The Center is also committed to fighting inequality in mental health care by seeking and leveraging partnerships to ensure that innovations are accessible to all, regardless of background.