Sven Sandin

Sven Sandin is a statistician and epidemiologist with 35 years of experience, 200 research publications and an Associate Professor at the Departments of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.. He has a background from the pharmaceutical industry where he gained broad experience in design and analysis of clinical trials, phases I to IV, production and toxicology. Since joining Karolinska Institutet in 2003 he has been involved in studies of pregnancy related outcomes, psychiatric epidemiology, cancer, autoimmune diseases and mapping risk to occupation and familial exposure using the Swedish registers.

His current research focus is on the etiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders. As such he is the PI of a NIH funded project examining autism risk in families with Rheumatoid arthritis (RAASD) and the PI of a project funded by the Swedish Research Council examining etiological links between autism and preterm birth.

He is the PI of a two genetic data collections in Sweden. One includes 3,000 individuals with autism in Sweden and another includes more than 3,000 individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome and tics. The purpose of the genetic studies is to identify genes and possible environmental factors that increase the risk of developing the different disorders.

He is the PI of the Women Lifestyle and Health cohort (WLH) which was set up to create a large prospective cohort designed specifically to investigate the association between lifestyle factors (exogenous hormones and dietary habits) and cancer and cardiovascular diseases in young women. The cohort includes 50,000 women who answered an extensive questionnaire in 1991/92, a follow-up questionnaire in 2003/04.