Program Officer
Abbas Parsian, Ph.D.
Focus Area
Biographical Summary
Dr. Abbas Parsian is a Program Director in the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). His extramural research grant portfolio includes mapping susceptibility variants (genes) contributing to the development of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), using different approached and methods; Genetics and Genomics data (GWAS and Transcriptomics) integration and modeling; Genomic and single cell sequencing; G x E methods development using existing data.
Dr. Parsian represents NIAAA on NIH Genomic Data Submission and Management Taskforce. This committee is responsible for developing guidelines and monitoring data submission and request from dbGaP.
Dr. Parsian is a member of NIH Genetic Program Administration (GPA) on behalf of NIAAA. This committee oversees the developing guidelines for data use and security.
Dr. Parsian represents NIAAA as a member and previous chair of Joint Aging, Addiction and Mental Health (JAAMH). The committee receives and reviews applications to access data from above ICs to perform secondary analysis and modeling.
Dr. Parsian is a staff collaborator and a member of the Collaborative study on Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) steering committee. COGA is a long-term cooperative agreement that started in 1989 to collect a large family sample and identify genetic contribution to the development of AUD.
Dr. Parsian received his doctoral degree from Western Michigan University in Biomedical Sciences with major on Human Genetics. As a post-doctoral fellow at Washington University School of Medicine he started to work on the Genetics of Neuropsychiatric disorders including Alcohol Use Disorder and Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Parsian continued his research in areas of gene mapping by means of Linkage and Association analyses, Dopamine pathway genes analysis, GWAS and sequencing methods for more than 20 years.
Selected Publications
Haitao Z, Grant BF, Hodgkinson CA, Ruan WJ, Kerridge BT, Huang B, SahaTD, Fan AZ, Wilson V, Jung J, Parsian A, Goldman D, Chou P. Strong and weak cross-inheritance of substance use disorders in a nationally representative sample. Molecular Psychiatry (2022) 27:1742–1753; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-021-01370-0