My name is Hanna van Loo and I am a psychiatrist and principal investigator (PI) at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) of the University of Groningen. As a psychiatrist, I am seeing patients at the outpatient department for patients with mood disorders at the University Center of Psychiatry, UMCG.
My lab focuses on a better understanding of mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders, with a particular focus on internalizing disorders such as major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. We use methods from epidemiology, genetics, and statistical learning to better understand the complex causes of these disorders. In addition, I am using insights from philosophy of science to reflect on disease classification in psychiatry, and how machine learning and genetics could be used to improve this classification (work together with Jan-Willem Romeijn).
I studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Groningen (MD, MA, both with distinction). I was trained as a researcher and psychiatrist at the UMCG (PhD, with distinction). During my PhD training I stayed at Ron Kessler’s lab at Harvard School of Public Health. Then I was a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University with Kenneth Kendler, with whom I still actively collaborate. I was a research affiliate of the Stanley Center at the Broad Institute (2017-2023). I returned to the UMCG and started my own research group in 2019.
My main projects are currently:
- Genetic nurture effects in psychiatry (VENI project PI, NIMH R01-project, co-I)
- Pathways of Internalizing and Functional disorders (PATHFINDER, NIMH R01-project, PI)
- Genomics Research of Lifetime Depression in the Netherlands: The BIObanks Netherlands Internet Collaboration (BIONIC) Project (co-I)
- Data science in psychopathology: gold rush in the data mine (VICI project Jan-Willem Romeijn, co-I)
For further projects, please check my CV.
My group uses the rich data from Lifelines, a population based three-generational cohort study in the north of the Netherlands. As a psychiatrist, I am contributing to Lifelines data on internalizing and substance use disorders in terms of collection and cleaning.
I am a member of the Young Academy Groningen
