Dr. Erika Nurmi received her M.D. and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the Medical Scientist Training Program. She completed her general psychiatry residency in the research track at the UCLA Semel Institute and continues in a combined research and clinical child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship. Dr. Nurmi has a long-standing interest in the genetics of childhood psychiatric disorders. Her graduate work explored the molecular genetics of autism, genomic imprinting, and chromosome 15. She is currently working with Dr. James T. McCracken and Dr. Stanley F. Nelson as part of the national Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Collaborative Genetics Study (OCGS) group, seeking to identify genes underlying OCD susceptibility. Her Friends of the Semel Institute supported project focuses on gene discovery in a genetically-enriched, early-onset, tic-related subset of the OCGS sample.