Matcheri S.Keshavan MD., WSU professor of Psychiatry, recently received a four-year National Institute of Mental Health grant totalling $ 2.65 million dollars beginning this month. The grant includes a subcontract to University of Michigan. This grant, titled Bipolar and Schizophrenia Consortium to parse Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) is one of 5 sites throughout the US to receive this initiative; the other sites are the Yale University, University of Maryland, University of Illinois, and the University of Texas, Dallas. The main goals of the study are to characterize the physiological and neuroanatomical endophenotypes, i.e. biomarkers and their molecular genetic underpinnings in a large, multi-site series of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and their relatives. An understanding of the genetic and neurobiological basis of these two disorders will eventually help clinicians make better diagnoses based on the underlying pathophysiology rather than the current reliance on purely descriptive, clinical measures. Elucidating the pathophysiology and causation of these disorders will also lead to more novel, hypothesis-driven treatments.