Sophie Erhardt
Senior Investigator, Non-Resident Member

Karolinska Institute

Sophie Erhardt is Professor & Head, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. She is also a Professor in Experimental Psychiatry at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research is focused on understanding the pathophysiology of severe psychiatric disorders to identify novel pharmaceutical targets. In particular, she studies how the immune system interacts with the kynurenine pathway and associates it with behavior.

During her Ph.D., Sophie was the first to show that kynurenic acid, is elevated in the CSF of patients with schizophrenia. She carried out postdoctoral work in Professor Mark Geyer’s lab at the USCD, USA, and showed that increased levels of kynurenic acid were associated with disrupted PPI, a core feature of schizophrenia.

After completing her postdoctoral training, Sophie set up her laboratory at Karolinska Institutet, continuing to investigate the underlying immunological mechanisms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and suicidality and the fact that early-life changes in kynurenic acid concentrations could contribute to the development of schizophrenia.

Prof. Erhardt has supervised 14 Ph.D. students and is the PI of a large drug discovery project that is currently in the lead generation phase. In 2022, Prof. Erhardt was awarded the Maltz Prize for Innovative & Promising Schizophrenia Research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. https://staff.ki.se/people/sophie-erhardt; https://news.ki.se/sophie-erhardt-formally-appointed-new-head-of-department-at-fyfa