BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Kelsoe attended Vanderbilt University and graduated from medical school at the University of Alabama, Birmingham in 1981. He completed internship training at Washington University in St. Louis and psychiatry residency at UCSD. He then went to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland for 4 years and returned to San Diego to join the UCSD and VA Departments of Psychiatry faculty in 1989. Dr. Kelsoe has also served on the board of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics. Dr. Kelsoe’s longstanding research focus has been the genetics of bipolar disorder and lithium response. Dr. Kelsoe is presently the director of the Laboratory of Psychiatric Genomics and a member of the UCSD Institute for Genomic Medicine. Dr. Kelsoe directs the Bipolar Genome Study (BiGS) which is conducting whole genome sequencing studies of bipolar families. He also co-founded the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium for Bipolar Disorder (PGC-BD) which is a collaborative effort of over 30 international sites designed to identify genes for bipolar disorder in a sample of over 50,000 patients. Dr. Kelsoe also directs the Pharmacogenomics of Bipolar Disorder Study (PGBD) whose goal is to identify genetic variants that are associated with good response to lithium. This study includes a prospective clinical trial conducted at 11 international collaborative sites. More recently, Dr. Kelsoe has adopted stem cell methods in order to understand the differences in neurons from bipolar patients and controls, as well as, lithium responders from non-responders.