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Psychiatric Social Worker (Research) suvarnashruthin@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Clinical Team Shruthi N Psychiatric Social Worker (Research) CBM

Data Supervisor varalakshmir93@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Admin Team Varalakshmi R Data Supervisor CBM, A-BIG-NET

Senior Scientific Officer, Department of Psychiatry meera.purushottam@gmail.com ResearchGate | Back Back to People Page Back Investigator Team Molecular Genetics Dr Meera Purushottam Senior Scientific Officer, Department of Psychiatry CBM, MGL Dr Meera Purushottam is senior geneticist at the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at NIMHANS where the focus has been the genetic basis and correlates of psychiatric and neurological diseases. The laboratory is the testing ground for many clinicians who base their post graduate and doctoral thesis dissertations on wet lab experiments carried out under her supervision. Her work has focused on trying to understand the influence of gene variants on disease presentation and response to drugs. Cells derived from patients have been used to unravel disease mechanisms better, while whole exome studies have helped to identify rare risk variants in severe mental illness in patients. She is in charge of genetic testing for early onset neuromuscular and late onset movement disorders. She is interested in understanding the biological implications of genetic variants at the level of the patient, the tissue and the cell. The effect of the environment on the DNA methylome is an area of specific interest. Parthaje, S., Janardhanan, M., Paul, P., Karunakaran, K. B., Deb, A. P., Shankarappa, B., Pal, P. K., Mahadevan, A., Jain, S., Viswanath, B., & Purushottam, M . (2025). CAG Repeat Instability and Region-Specific Gene Expression Changes in the SCA12 Brain. The Cerebellum , 24 (3), 60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-025-01808-z Patra, C., Ganesh, S., Mahadevan, J., Gujarati, K., Awasthy, D., George, S., Ganapathy, A., Phalke, S., Bettadapura, R., Viswanath, B., Varghese, M., Jain, S., Prasad, P., & Purushottam, M. (2024). W48. PROFILING THE RARE VARIANT GENETIC RISK FOR DEMENTIA WITH WHOLE EXOME SEQUENCING: A STUDY FROM INDIA. European Neuropsychopharmacology , 87 , 126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2024.08.257 Ratna, N., Venkatesh, S. D., Pasupulati, S., Murari, G., Kamble, N., Viswanath, B., Yadav, R., Varghese, M., Pal, P. K., Jain, S., & Purushottam, M. (2025). Allelic Diversity, de novo CAG Expansions, and Intergenerational Instability at the HTT Locus in a clinical sample of Huntington’s Disease from India . https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.03.21260193 Shankarappa, B., Prasad, V. P., Kumar, S., Rao, R. S., Royal, A. B., Swamy, M., Prasad, P., Niranjana Murthy, A. S., Ganesh, S., Viswanath, B., Jain, S., Purushottam, M., & Thyloth, M. (2024). A Novel Homozygous Variant in CPLANE1 Gene in a Patient with Developmental Deficits. Molecular Syndromology , 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1159/000541167 Vinod, P., Sen, S., Jayasankar, P., Janardhanan, M., Paul, P., Viswanath, B., Jain, S., Harbishettar, V., Sivakumar, P. T., & Purushottam, M. (2024). Does Apolipoprotein E polymorphism play a role in familial Alzheimer’s Dementia. Alzheimer’s & Dementia , 20 (S1), e087257. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.087257

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Centre for Integrative Medicine and Research hollabharath@gmail.com LinkedIn ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0999-1237 Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Addiction Dr Bharath Holla Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Centre for Integrative Medicine and Research Dr. Holla is a physician-scientist (MD, PhD) involved in patient care, research and post-graduate training in psychiatry. He has a deep interest in designing novel treatment approaches for psychiatric disorders, as well as using traditional approaches (like yoga) for health and well-being After completing postgraduate residency in psychiatry, he specialised in the field of addiction psychiatry with a post-doctoral clinical fellowship at NIMHANS. His PhD work involved imaging-genomics of addiction vulnerability in adolescents. He strongly believes that future progress in neuroscience and psychiatry will stem from open-science and multi-disciplinary collaborations. Therefore, he has been actively involved in several multi-institute and multi-country population neuroscience work that have resulted in high-impact research publications and larger impacts on the community. Benegal, V., Chakrabarti, A., Holla, B. , Basu, D., Sharma, E., Purushottam, M., Mahadevan, J., Goyal, N., Nebhinani, N., Basu, A., Singh, R. L., Khanra, S., & Viswanath, B. (2024). W57. PATHWAYS TO RESILIENCE AND MENTAL-HEALTH [PARAM]: A NEURODEVELOPMENTAL COHORT FROM INDIA. European Neuropsychopharmacology , 87 , 132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2024.08.266 Bhargav, H., Raghavan, V., Rao, N. P., Gulati, K., Binumon, K. V., Anu, K. N., Ravi, S., Jasti, N., Holla, B., Varambally, S., & Ramachandran, P. (2024). Validation and efficacy of a tele-yoga intervention for improving psychological stress, mental health and sleep difficulties of stressed adults diagnosed with long COVID: A prospective, multi-center, open-label single-arm study. Frontiers in Psychology , 15 , 1436691. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1436691 Jeevan, Y., Mahadevan, J., Viswanath, B., Jain, S., Ganesh, S., Holla, B., Purushottam, M., & Shankarappa, B. (2024). F35. INVESTIGATING GENETIC RISK FOR PSYCHOSIS IN BIPOLAR DISORDER IN INDIA USING POLYGENIC SCORES. European Neuropsychopharmacology , 87 , 224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2024.08.446 Mahadevan, J., Holla, B. , Ganesh, S., Shankarappa, B., Paul, P., Sud, R., Jain, S., Purushottam, M., & Viswanath, B. (2024). W32. A GENOME-WIDE ASSOCIATION STUDY OF BIPOLAR DISORDER FROM INDIA. European Neuropsychopharmacology , 87 , 118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroneuro.2024.08.241 Shekar Mv, C., Bhargav, H., Holla, B., Mahadevan, J., Singh, A., Narasimha, V. L., Katla, N., Snigdha, A., S, K., & Maheswari, E. (2024). Efficacy of yoga-breath linked intervention to stop smoking (Y-BLISS) in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked per day among smokers attempting to reduce or quit: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial. Wellcome Open Research , 9 , 693. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.22839.1

Professor, Department of Psychiatry LinkedIn | Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Investigator Team Addiction Dr Vivek Benegal Professor, Department of Psychiatry Dr Vivek Benegal works in addiction medicine and the genetics of psychiatric disorders. He is interested in developmental behaviour, especially drug abuse and high risk behaviour in street and working children. He is also interested in child development issues and the use of developmentally appropriate aids for children's education and recreation. He conducts drug abuse awareness programmes and life skills training for children in schools and colleges. He has developed a drug awareness module in comic book form. He is involved in the epidemiological assessment of and intervention in drug use and high risk sexual behaviour among street and working children. He has a diploma in communications in film and theatre, and has experience in theatre and documentary cinema. He has made three films, and educational slide shows, and he is interested in theatre and cinema for children. Publications Basu, A., Jayashankar, P., Guin, A., Sarkar, S., Saha, P. K., Misra, R., Sinha, D., Neogi, R., Saha, S., Benegal, V ., Rao, G. N., Varghese, M., & Gururaj, G. (2024). Magnitude, Extent, and Burden of Substance-use Disorders in West Bengal: Findings from the National Mental Health Survey (NMHS), 2016. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine , 46 (6), 558–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/02537176241265079 Goyal, S., Sudhir, P. M., Mehta, U. M., Prathyusha, P. V., Kumar, K., & Benegal, V. (2025). Adult ADHD presentations in an Indian tertiary care setting: Gender perspectives. Asian Journal of Psychiatry , 106 , 104419. Jaisoorya, T. S., Rao, G. N., Reed, G. M., Binu, V. S., Thennarasu, K., Stein, D. J., Maré, K. T., Lochner, C., García-Pacheco, J. A., & Benegal, V. (2025). Examining the Psychometric Properties of the Flexible Interview for ICD-11 (FLII-11) among Adults in India. Journal of Psychiatric Research . https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395625001785 Kundu, P., Dey, S., Krishnan, A., Ghosh, S., Rao, G. N., Benegal, V. , Varghese, M., & Gururaj, G. (2025). Association between exposure to fine particulate matter from different emission sources and mental health outcomes in India . Copernicus Meetings. https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/EGU25-687.html Shivaprakash, P., Shukla, L., Joshi, S., Mahadevan, J., Kandasamy, A., Chand, P. K., Benegal, V. , & Murthy, P. (2025). Tapentadol as a drug of abuse–A preliminary report. Indian Journal of Psychiatry , 67 (2), 256–259.

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Suhas Satish Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry Dr. Suhas Satish is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NIMHANS, with active research interests at the intersection of clinical neuroscience, precision psychiatry, and digital mental health. He holds an M.D. in Psychiatry and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Neurosciences and Therapeutics in Schizophrenia. His work has been recognised through several honours, including the Early Career Fellowship of the World Psychiatric Association, the NIMHANS Silver Jubilee Award (University Gold Medal), and the Frank Noronha Award for Best Outgoing Resident. Through his work, Dr. Suhas aims to advance a future where mental-health care is predictive, personalised, and grounded in measurable biology in combination with clinical wisdom through the power of data, technology, and neuroscience.

Project Associate hema.hp17@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Clinical Team, Doctoral Candidate Hemavathi BN Project Associate CBM, A-BIG-NET Hi, I am Hemavathi a Project Associate 1 at GenECT. With a Master's degree in Psychology, I have work experience with Addition Medicine, Women and Child development and community outreach awareness programmes. I enjoy cooking, craft works and traveling.

Additional Professor of Clinical Psychology dr.himanikashyap@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Himani Kashyap Additional Professor of Clinical Psychology

Professor, Department of Psychiatry arunnimhans05@gmail.com Google Scholar Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Arun Kandasamy Professor, Department of Psychiatry Arun Kandasamy is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences. His clinical interests are Psychiatry, Public Health, Psychopharmacology, Neurobiology, Psychopathology, Neurobiology and Brain Physiology, Addiction Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Comorbidity, Addiction Psychology

Data Entry Operator genect.deonimhans@gmail.com Back Back to People Page Back Support Team Bhramaramba Data Entry Operator CBM, GenECT

Director & Senior Professor, Department of Psychiatry ResearchGate Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Dr Pratima Murthy Director & Senior Professor, Department of Psychiatry Dr. Pratima brings about 30 years of extensive experience and exceptional accomplishments in the field of mental health. A well-recognized leader in addiction psychiatry, she has been instrumental in the successful development of state-of-the-art Centre for Addiction Medicine at NIMHANS. She has served as a consultant to prominent international agencies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). She has also served as a resource person for various flagship training programmes in substance abuse prevention and tobacco cessation in the country, and across the globe. Dr Pratima is also recognised for her contribution in improving care for persons with mental illness through her work with the National Human Rights Commission on quality assurance in mental health care both in institutions and in the community. In recognition of her research and academic excellence, Dr. Pratima has received numerous awards and honours including the prestigious Dr. Raja Ramanna State Award by the Government of Karnataka and Lifetime Achievement Award from Rotary. Recently, she was honoured with the WHO Regional Director’s Special Recognition Award on ‘World No Tobacco Day 2021’ for her remarkable service in tobacco control. A prolific author, she has more than 300 research publications in various international indexed journals and scientific books to her credit. Dr. Pratima received her MBBS degree from Bangalore Medical College in 1985. She obtained DPM and MD (Psychological Medicine) from NIMHANS in 1987 and 1989 respectively. She joined as a faculty at her alma mater in 1993, and has worked in various academic capacities since then. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP), Glasgow.

Lab Senior Scientist (Equivalent to Research Associate Professor), Department of Psychiatry reeteka@gmail.com Twitter | LinkedIn ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7866-6983 Resilience and representation in research: In conversation with Reeteka Sud Stress primes brain hub to trigger freezing for unrelated fears Back Back to People Page Back Co-Investigator Team Stem Cell Research Dr Reeteka Sud Lab Senior Scientist (Equivalent to Research Associate Professor), Department of Psychiatry CBM How can patient-derived stem cells help connect the dots, from genomic risk to clinical diagnosis -- this is the unifying research theme for my various projects. My expertise lies broadly at the intersection of Genetics, Neuroscience and Psychiatry. I head the CBM Biorepository at NIMHANS, where we bank biospecimen from psychiatric patients, including stem cells, DNA, plasma and serum. I am also very passionate about scicomm/public outreach on mental health conditions Select Publications 2026 PrecInNor: An Indo-Norway collaborative programme for precision psychiatry training | Asian J Psychiatry 2025 Defining suicidality phenotypes for genetic studies: perspectives of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Suicide Working Group | Molecular Psychiatry The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium: discoveries and directions | Lancet Psychiatry The measurement of agitation in neurocognitive disorders: A systematic review | Alzheimer's & Dementia 2024 Exploring Mental Health Stima in the context of Psychiatric Genetics: Insights from the ISPG Stigma Reduction SIG Survey The STEM Arena in India: A Story of Exclusion in Many Colors Altered neuroepithelial morphogenesis and migration defects in iPSC-derived cerebral organoids and 2D neural stem cells in familial bipolar disorder | Oxford Open Neurosci Projects Deciphering the molecular mechanisms of treatment-resistant schizophrenia and clozapine response: To understand the genomic and cellular predictors of treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS) and clozapine response using genome-wide association study (GWAS) and induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC): Here our aim is to: Identify genomic factors underlying TRS and clozapine response Elucidate cellular mechanisms of TRS and clozapine response in IPSC-derived organoids Evaluate the translational utility of these genetic/cellular markers as predictors of TRS and clozapine response using existing prospective cohorts (Funding from PGRN, BFI Foundation) Subcellular Dynamics in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Our recent work highlights the manifold ways in which sub-cellular organelles may be driving disease pathogenesis. We discovered connections between APOE genotype and ribosome biogenesis, which could be significant for ADRD pathogenesis, and is currently under investigation. We are also using techniques like ExM to study how cytoskeletal structures mediate the workings of antipsychotic drugs, and by extension, be affected in psychotic disorders. (Funding from Ben Barres Award, Axilor Labs) Key Research Outputs (C) Direction of migration. C1-C3 cells migrated in a relatively directional pattern. B1 and B2 cells, however, migrated in a random, non-directed manner. Both BD lines showed back-and-forth movement, and directional and circular patterns of migration. (D) Sample migratory paths of control and patient-derived lines over 15 h. Abnormalities in the migration of neural precursor cells in familial bipolar disorder The trajectories of migrating neural precursors lay the foundations of the developing central nervous system. Here we demonstrate identifiable cellular abnormalities in NPCs derived from BD patients. The BD patients in this study were chosen from a dense family, who had multiple rare damaging variants implicated in cellular migration, and had structural abnormalities noted on brain MRI scans ( Fig. 1 A). Cellular migration analysis showed that although patient-derived NPCs showed a random trajectory, the NPCs from healthy controls migrated towards other cells (directed/ballistic movement) ( Fig. 1 C-D). Integration of deep clinical phenotyping with investigations into cellular mechanisms in patient-derived IPSCs, as reported here, can provide much-needed comprehensive understanding of psychiatric disorders. Cell cycle abnormality is a cellular phenotype in OCD A critical and yet unanswered question in Psychiatry is how might clinical phenotypes manifest in terms of cellular readouts. This study was conducted to determine differences in cell cycle in patient-derived cells vs controls A) Illustrates the placement of Indian samples between European and East Asian clusters, highlighting notable regional variability. Asian PCA with HGDP samples. B) Presents a north-south ancestral gradient, correlated with latitude. SVM predictions. C) Decile-based risk stratification in BD A cross ancestry genetic study of psychiatric disorders from India We estimated the extent of population stratification as well as the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores (PGS) derived from European samples to a data set from India. Our analyses reveal global and continental PCA overlap with other South Asian populations. Admixture analysis revealed a north-south genetic axis within India (FST 1.6%). The Bayesian PGS analyses indicates moderate-to-high predictive power for BD.