The major focus of Kenneth Kendler's research is in the genetics of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders. Two major methodologies are used in this research. The first involves large population based twin samples. In these twins the aggregate role of genetic and environmental factors is addressed. The aim is to understand how these factors interact and correlate, and how, through development, the vulnerability to psychiatric illness and drug abuse is expressed. Samples have been taken from the Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders as well as Norway, Sweden and Holland. Kendler's work has focused on a wide range of disorders including major depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, externalizing behaviors, alcoholism, and drug abuse. He has also worked towards understanding the genetic and environmental sources of comorbidity of psychiatric and substance use disorders.
Josef Parnas' main research interests comprise epidemiology and pathogenesis of schizophrenia, including longitudinal prospective studies of children at risk, genetic studies, and psychopathology of schizophrenia, addressed both on a theoretical level and through empirical research. Parnas, also trained as a medical doctor, has always been working at the interface between philosophy and psychiatry with a special emphasis on the psychiatric phenomenology. Over the last two decades he has been pioneering research on anomalies of self-experience in schizophrenia. He is a co-founder of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary research institute, integrating philosophy of mind, phenomenology, psychopathology and cognitive science.