Dr. Jeremiah Scharf is a behavioral neurologist and neuropsychiatric geneticist whose academic interests lie in disorders that bridge the gap between traditional neurologic and psychiatric concepts of disease. Despite being a native New Yorker and a lapsed Yankees fan, Jeremiah moved to Boston after college and never left. He received his B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and a combined M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Harvard University, where he worked with Dr. Louis Kunkel to identify modifying genes for spinal muscular atrophy. After completing Neurology residency at Mass General Brigham and a clinical fellowship in Behavioral Neurology/Neuropsychiatry, Jeremiah was drawn to Tourette Syndrome (TS) clinical care and research, since TS has long been considered a highly heritable, paradigmatic neuropsychiatric disorder, thus providing a unique opportunity to dissect the genetic and molecular basis of the brain circuitry at the interface of neurology and psychiatry and to use this knowledge to improve diagnosis, treatment and quality of life for individuals and families. In his post-doctoral work with Dr. David Pauls, he led the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) for Tourette Syndrome and co-led a parallel GWAS for OCD. As an independent CGM faculty member, he has overseen cross-disorder genetic analyses of TS and OCD, as well as multi-center GWAS, CNV, exome and whole-genome sequencing studies of TS and related disorders. The lab’s work has been supported by grants from the Tourette Association of America, the American Academy of Neurology, the TLC Foundation for Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs), and the National Institutes of Health (NINDS, NIMH, and NHGRI).
