Dr. Elizabeth Atkinson receives the Pamela Sklar Innovation Award

Dr. Elizabeth Atkinson, Assistant Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and principal investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, received the Pamela Sklar Innovation Award at the 2023 World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics Awards Ceremony in Montreal, Canada for her outstanding work in the Latin American Genomics Consortium (LAGC). 

Dr. Atkinson, together with Dr. Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, and Dr. Paola Giusti Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Florida, were chosen for this award for their contributions in leading LAGC. They were recognized for establishing the largest collaboration of diverse Latin American psychiatric geneticists and LAGC’s development of novel methods, furthering the understanding of the genetic basis of psychiatric conditions in Latin American populations, and training of the next generation of diverse researchers.

The Pamela Sklar Innovation Award honors the legacy of the late Dr. Pamela Sklar, a pioneering American neuroscientist, and psychiatrist who made significant contributions to the field of psychiatric genetics and was a passionate mentor for women in science. The award is administered by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. This award recognizes outstanding scientists who have made innovative advances in psychiatric genetics, reflecting Dr. Sklar's dedication to integrating genomics and clinical psychiatry to better understand psychiatric disorders.

LAGC is the largest consortia of psychiatric genomics research in Latin America. It was established in 2019 at the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics representing the United States (including Puerto Rico), Canada, Australia, and eight Latin American countries, including Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. It aims to accelerate psychiatric genomics research in Latin American populations and foster collaborations globally by increasing the sample size of genomic studies, developing novel methods that account for admixture, supporting recruitment and genotyping efforts in Latin American countries and worldwide, and providing educational and training resources for Latin American researchers.