John Kelsoe MD

John Rice Kelsoe 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 UC San Diego. He then went to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for 4 years and returned to San Diego to join the Department of Psychiatry faculty in 1989. Dr. Kelsoe’s longstanding research focus has been the genetics of psychiatric illness, bipolar disorder in particular. Over the past 20 years, his work has been focused on using a variety of molecular genetic methods to identify the specific genes that predispose to bipolar disorder. Towards this, he has directed several large consortia for genetic studies. He helped found the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium for Bipolar Disorder (PGC-BD), which is a large international consortium for conducting genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of bipolar disorder. This group includes over a hundred investigators studying over 40,000 subjects with bipolar disorder, that has recently identified over 60 genes for bipolar disorder.

Dr. Kelsoe also directs the Bipolar Genome Study (BiGS), a consortium of 12 national sites directed at identifying genes for bipolar disorder. This group conducted one of the first GWAS of bipolar disorder and one of the first genome sequencing studies. He also founded and directs the Pharmacogenomics of Bipolar Disorder Study (PGBD), which is focused on identifying genes that influence response to the medication lithium. This large international consortium has conducted a GWAS on a prospectively assessed clinical study of lithium response. Dr. Kelsoe’s more recent studies have focused on stem cell-derived neurons (IPSC) and their response to lithium and other medications, as well as an IPSC study of antidepressant response in depression. Together, this work has identified numerous genes related to the genetic basis of bipolar disorder and lithium response and neuronal functions that may mediate these effects. Dr. Kelsoe’s primary clinical focus is the treatment of refractory mood disorders. He is an attending psychiatrist at UCSD Psychiatric Services, where he supervises and teaches psychiatric residents.