Dr. Wesley Thompson

Biography

Wesley Thompson earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Rutgers University in 2003, with a focus on statistical methods for longitudinal data analysis. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, where he was awarded a five-year NIH K25 Career Development Award to develop novel statistical methods for studying co-variation in brain function related to depression. In 2008, he joined the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in the Department of Psychiatry. His current research involves Bayesian semi-parametric mixture models, with applications that include improving effect size estimation, replication, and prediction in genomic studies, predicting the onset of illness through multivariate biomarker trajectories, and applying functional data analysis to functional MRI data. His research is primarily focused on developing and applying semi-parametric Bayesian hierarchical mixture models for biological psychiatry, including areas such as human brain imaging, polygenic risk score estimation, and the modeling of developmental trajectories in longitudinal studies.

Research Interests