About

Hi there! I’m Michel G. Nivard a Dutch psychologist turned genetic epidemiologist, now happily based at the University of Bristol. I spend my days tinkering with huge DNA datasets, trying to work out how our genes and environments team up to shape behaviour and mental-health. Below is the “about-page” version of my academic résumé.

What I’m Doing Now

I hold a chair in Genetic Epidemiology at Bristol Medical School’s Population Health Sciences and its Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU). My lab builds and applies methods, most famously GenomicSEM, an open-source R package that lets researchers pick apart the shared genetics of complex traits (github.com). Day-to-day I juggle genome-wide association studies (GWAS), gene-by-environment models, and causal inference methods for the social sciences.

How I Got Here

  • Bachelors and Masters in pyschological methos My very early academic education, that is after dropping out of an AI undergrad program,was in psychological methods, where I learned to appriciate a good latent variable, or item response model, and learned to think of every problem as a measurement problem and of strcutura equatino modelign as the path to every solution. Lets jsut say I got good instinct and never was able to shake the bad instincts.

  • PhD & early career at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)—I cut my teeth in statistical genetics during a PhD in Biological Psychology and stuck around as post-doc, assistant and then associate professor.

  • Bristol move—In 2024 I swapped Amsterdam’s canals for Clifton Downs, joining the IEU to scale up multivariate genetics and mentor the next wave of method-geeks.

Research in a Nutshell

  1. Multivariate & longitudinal genetics – Using GenomicSEM and allied tools to map shared genetic influences across psychiatric traits, cognition, and lifestyle (github.com).
  2. Gene-environment interplay – From in-utero famine effects on BMI to how retirement frees our internal body-clock, I like models where context matters.
  3. Assortative mating & social genetics – Recent work explores how genetics nudges partner choice and shapes social networks (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

Highlights I’m Proud Of

  • Early-career Appriciation: I was awarded the Behavior Genetics Association’s Fuller & Scott Award (research.vu.nl) and a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship (jacobsfoundation.org).
  • Community builder: co-founded the Genetics Network Amsterdam (GENE) to connect social-science geneticists across Dutch universities (geneticsnetworkamsterdam.org).

Staying in Touch

  • Email: m.g.nivard @ bristol.ac.uk
  • GitHub: github.com/MichelNivard (for GenomicSEM & assorted scripts) (github.com)

Last updated: 23 June 2025.