Arturas Petronis - Biography#

Arturas Petronis is a Professor, Senior Scientist, and Head, Epigenetics Laboratory of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He has just finished his 10 year tenure as the Tapscott Chair in Schizophrenia Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He is the author and co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers of which 35 were published in high impact factor (10 or higher) journals, such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Nature Communications, American Journal of Human Genetics, Genome Biology and others. He has edited two books and wrote numerous book chapters. Dr. Petronis is a pioneer of epigenetic studies of psychiatric diseases, and he was the first in the world to launch a comprehensive program of psychiatric epigenetics in 2000. He established the Krembil Family Epigenetics Laboratory at CAMH in 2002 and now leads a team of 15 researchers performing large scale epigenetic studies. He supervised more than 20 post-doctoral fellows and graduated 6 PhD and 6 MSc students. Dr. Petronis has been a PI on numerous projects supported by the Canadian, US, Lithuanian/EU and other agencies. The overall total support he was granted since 2014 exceeds $8M. While working in Canada, he has maintained close contacts with scientists in Lithuania, which resulted in a series of high quality publications and operating grants. In 2018 he established a Laboratory of Epigenetics Research at the Life Sciences Center, Vilnius, Lithuania, where he spends increasingly more time. In 2020 Dr. Petronis has become a recipient of the Distinguished Professor grant (1M euro) from the Lithuanian Science Council in support of his research activities in Lithuania.