Elemi Breetvelt

Dr. Breetvelt works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and epidemiologists at the department of psychiatry at SickKids.

During his clinical and scientific work, he has always focused on bridging the gap between expert clinical care and basic neuroscience. He focused on improving knowledge and understanding of the risk for developing severe mental health problems and the associated and unexplained multi morbidity have been the focus in recent years.

Dr. Breetvelt was trained both as a psychiatrist and a child psychiatrist (clinic and research, starting in 2004) and in genetic epidemiology (research, started in 2007). He trained and work as a child psychiatrist in the University Medical Centre Utrecht focused on (very early onset) schizophrenia and severe developmental disorders ranging from the very young (0-4 years) into adolescents.  He participated in national and international collaborations on establishing best clinical care guidelines for the most complex patients. In his clinical work was leading lead a clinical team that was capable of evaluating and managing the most complex patients, with both developmental disorders and medical conditions. Parallel to his clinical work he trained in clinical epidemiology and finished my PhD, focusing on reversed phenotyping of genetic risk variants in the general population. He came to Toronto, Canada to expend his clinical expertise in adults with 22q11.2DS and continue my work on (genetic) epidemiology.

Among others, I have been instrumental in developing a normative IQ chart for 22q11.2DS and a new concept of an increased burden of SNV as risk factor for schizophrenia.

At the moment he is involved in acute psychiatric clinical care at SickKids and participates in ongoing genetic epidemiological research. In which he and his collaborators have the ambition to develop better risk models for explaining the impact of genetic risk factors on severe mental health.

Honours and Awards