Prof. Dr. Na Cai
Prof. Dr. Na Cai
Assistant Professor at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering
- Tel: +41 61 387 34 21
- 0000-0001-7496-2075
- V-Card (vcf, 1kb)
Additional information
CV PDFHonours
| Year | Distinction |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Early Excellence Science Award (Biology) 2024, Bayer Foundation |
| 2024 | Akademie-Preise in den mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Niedersächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen |
| 2024 | Theodore Reich Early Career Award, International Society of Psychiatric Genetics |
| 2023 | Friedmund Neumann Preis, Schering Stiftung |
Additional information
Dr Na Cai is a quantitative geneticist studying the genetic basis of mental health disorders (specifically Major Depressive Disorder, MDD). She read Natural Sciences (Biological) at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and get her PhD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) and University of Oxford with Professor Jonathan Flint. She then had postdoctoral training at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL-EBI, before starting her own group in Helmholtz Munich in 2019. Her group moved to D-BSSE in ETH Zurich in Feb 2025, where she is now Assistant Professor in Computational Medical Genomics.
Dr Na Cai’s research is focused on understanding how genetic variants affect risk for neuropsychiatric diseases, either directly or in conjunction with physiological and external environments. Her group uses computational and quantitative methods to interrogate large-scale genomic datasets for the effects of genetic variation on neuropsychiatric disease risk. In addition to finding statistical associations, Dr Cai's group aims to elucidate the molecular pathways, tissue specificity, physiological context and environmental modulators behind them.