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Shaunna Clark, PhD

Shaunna L Clark
Shaunna L Clark, PhD

Associate Professor

Contact

Psychiatry
8441 Riverside Parkway, Room 1410
Bryan , TX 77807
slclark@tamu.edu
Phone: 979.436.0179

Education and Training

  • University of California Berkeley, BA Statistics, 2003
  • University of California Los Angeles, MA Advanced Quantitative Methods, 2004
  • University of California Los Angeles, PhD Advanced Quantitative Methods, 2004

Research Interests

  • Dr. Clark’s research seeks to understand how biological and environmental factors shape substance use and addiction. Specifically, the lab focuses on the role of genetics and epigenetics in the etiology of substance use and addiction and identifying (epi)genetic biomarkers. This line of research will eventually lead to the improvement of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of substance addiction and its related health effects. We approach these research questions using a translational framework that incorporates both human and animal studies, big data, and advanced statistical modeling techniques.

Representative Publications

Clark, S.L., Hattab, M.W., Chan, R.F., Shabalin, A.A., Han, K.M., Smit, J.H., Jansen, R., Milaneschi, Y., Xie, L.Y., van Grootheest, G., Penninx, B.W.J.H., Aberg, K.A., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2019). Predicting the future disease status of depressed patients from DNA methylation patterns in blood. Molecular Psychiatry. Sep 9. doi: 10.1038/s41380-019-0516-z.
 
Clark, S.L., Costin, B.N., Chan, R.F., Johnson, A.W., Xie, L.Y., Jurmain, J.L., Kumar, G., Shabalin, A.A., Pandey, A.K., Aberg, K.A., Miles, M.F., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2018). A whole methylome study of ethanol exposure in brain and blood: an exploration of the utility of peripheral blood as proxy tissue for brain in alcohol methylation studies. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 42(12): 2360-2368.
 
Aberg, K.A., Dean, B., Shabalin, A.A., Chan, R.F., Han, L.K.M., Zhao, M., van Grootheest, G. , Xie, L.Y., Milaneschi, Y., Clark, S.L., Turecki, G., Penninx, B.W.J.H., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2018) Methylome-wide association findings for major depressive disorder overlap in blood and brain and replicate in independent brain samples. Molecular Psychiatry. Sep 21. doi: 10.1038/s41380-018-0247-6
 
Han, K.M., Aghajani, M., Clark, S.L., Hattab, M.W., Shabalin, A.A., Zhao, M., Kumar, G., Chan, R.F., Xie, L.Y., Jansen, R., Aberg, K.A., van den Oord, J.C.G., Penninx, B.W.J.H. (2018) Accelerated epigenetic aging in major depressive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry. Aug 1;175(8):774-782. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17060595
 
Shabalin, A.A., Hattab, M.W., Clark, S.L., Chan, R.F., Kumar, G., Xie, L.Y., Zhao, M., Aberg, K.A., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2018). RaMWAS: Fast Methylome-wide association study pipeline for enrichment platforms. Bioinformatics. Jul 1;34(13):2283-2285. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bty069.
 
Hattab, M.W., Clark, S.L., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2017) Overestimation of the classification accuracy of a biomarker for assessing heavy alcohol use. Molecular Psychiatry. Nov;23(11):2114-2115. doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.181 Cho, S.B., Aliev, F., Clark, S.L., Adkins, A.E., Edenberg, H.E., Bucholz, K.K., Porjesz, B., Dick, D. M. (2017). Using patterns of genetic association to elucidate shared genetic etiologies across psychiatric disorders. Behavioral Genetics, 47(4), 405-45.
 
Chan, R.F., Shabalin, A.A., Xie, L.Y., Adkins, D.E., Zhao, M., Turecki, G., Clark, S.L., Aberg, K.A., van den Oord, E.J.G.C. (2017). Enrichment methods provide a feasible approach to comprehensive and adequately powered investigations of the brain methylome. Nucleic Acids Research, 45(11): e97.
 
Clark, S.L., McClay, J.L., Adkins, D.E., Aberg, K.A., Nerella, S., Xie, L., Collins, A., Crowley, J.J., Quakenbush, C., Hillard, C., Gao, G., Shabalin, A.A., Vrieze, S.I., Peterson, R.E., Copeland, W., Silberg, J., McGue, M., Maes, H., Iacono, W.G., Sullivan, P.F., Costello, E.J., van den Oord, E.J. (2017) Deep sequencing of 71 candidate genes to characterize variation associated with alcohol dependence. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. 41(4), 711-718.
 
Hattab, M.W., Shabalin, A.A., Clark, S.L., Zhao, M., Kumar, G., Chan, R.F., Xie, L.Y., Janssen, R., Han, L., Magnusson, P.K.E., van Grooteest, G., Hultman, C.M., Pennix, B.W., Aberg, K.A., van den Oord E.J.C.G. (2017) Correcting for cell type effects in DNA methylation studies: Reference-based methods outperform latent vector approaches in empirical studies. Genome Biology, 18(1), 24.
 
Clark, S.L., Gillespie, N., Adkins, D.A., Kendler, K.S., Neale, M.C. (2016). Psychometric modeling of abuse and dependence symptoms across six illicit substances indicates novel dimensions of misuse. Addictive Behaviors, 53, 132-140.
 
Cooke, M.E., Nasim, A., Cho, S.B., Kendler, K.S., Dick, D.M., Clark, S.L. (2016). Predicting tobacco use across the first year of college. American Journal of Health Behaviors, 40(4), 484-95.
 
van den Oord, E.J., Clark, S.L., Xie, L.Y., Shabalin, A.A., Dozmorov, M.G., Kumar, G., Vladimirov, V.L., Magnusson, P.K., Aberg, K.A. (2016). A whole methylome CpG-SNP association study of psychosis in blood and brain tissue. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 42(4), 1018-26.
 
Cho, S.B., Adkins, A.E., Cooke, M., Berenz, E.C., Kendler, K.S., Dick, D.M., Clark, S.L. (2015). Patterns of substance use across the first year of college and associated risk factors. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 6, 152.
 
Neale, M.C., Clark, S.L., Dolan, C.V., Hunter, M., (2016). Regime switching models of substance use: Time-varying and second-order Markov models and individual probability plots. Structural Equation Modeling, 23(2), 221-233.
 
Clark, S.L., McClay, J.L., Adkins, D.E., Aberg, K.A., Nerella, S., Xie, L., Collins, A., Crowley, J.J., Quackenbush, C., Hilliard, C., Gao, G., Copeland, W., Silberg, J., Maes, H., Sullivan, P., Costello, E.J., van den Oord, E.J. (2015). Deep sequencing of three loci implicated in large-scale GWAS smoking meta-analyses. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 18(5), 626-31.
 
Clark, S.L., Aberg, K.A., Nerella, S., Kumar, G., McClay, J.L., Chen, W., Xie, L.Y., Hudson, A., Harada, A., Gao, G., Hultman, C.M., Magnusson, P.K.E., Sullivan, P.F., van den Oord, E.J.C.G. (2015). Combined whole methylome and genome-wide association study
implicated CNTN4 in alcohol use. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 39(8), 1396-405.

Current Projects

  • Examining the role of DNA methylation in alcohol dependence using human post-mortem tissue samples from multiple brain regions
  • Identifying DNA methylation biomarkers of alcohol and related health effects in blood and saliva
  • Exploring the overlap in alcohol-related methylation in blood and brain in rodent models of addiction
  • Investigating the environmental factors that mediate the relationship between methylation and alcohol use and addiction
  • Developing latent variables models to better understand mental health outcomes
  • Applying machine learning techniques to epigenomic data