Emma Sprooten receives ERC Consolidator Grant 

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded its 2024 Consolidator Grants to 328 researchers across Europe. These grants, totalling €678 million, aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. The funding is provided through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. Emma Sprooten, neuroscientist of Radboud university medical center and Donders Institute, receives this grant.  

Project EM-POWER 

Mental health problems are linked to variations in the brain and genome. The mechanisms behind these associations are difficult to pinpoint because they are subtly distributed across thousands of genes and are not exclusively tied to neural processes. Additionally, emphasizing biological explanations often leads individuals experiencing mental health issues to feel powerless, as biology is commonly perceived as deterministic.

The proposal is that both mechanistic understanding and a sense of personal agency can be significantly improved by considering modifiable, heritable social and lifestyle factors—collectively referred to as the "environment"—as central components in the causal chain from genes to brain to mental health. Although environmental factors are known to be heritable, research continues to favor a bottom-up gene-brain causal model due to its intuitive and practical appeal. Current methodologies, which focus on pairwise associations between genetic, brain, and environmental variables, struggle to account for the complexity of heritable environmental influences.

To address this, a new multivariate method has been developed to identify patterns of shared genetic effects across thousands of variables. By integrating this approach with genetically informed causal models and family-based designs, the research aims to uncover the overall explanatory power and prevalence of environment-mediated genetic influences on the brain and mental health. Additionally, this method seeks to identify specific environmental factors that may act as mediators, determine when these factors emerge, and explore whether and how they can be personally modified.

The EM-POWER project aims to establish a novel, non-deterministic biological framework, providing new mechanistic insights into environment-mediated genetic influences on brain function and mental health. The long-term goal is to empower individuals by demonstrating the potential for personal control over biological factors, ultimately breaking the causal chains that link genetic vulnerability to mental health challenges.