About us.
We aim to help children and families maximize opportunities for optimal mental health.
What we do.
We are a diverse group of scientists researching the neurogenetics of psychiatric disorders, with a focus on autism and schizophrenia. Our work takes a systems-level approach by integrating methods in population genetics, transcriptomics, human neuroimaging, and clinical phenotyping to understand the neurobiology of these common neurodevelopmental disorders.
Why we do this work.
There is typically multi-year delay between psychiatric symptom onset and treatment, highlighting an urgent need to identify early markers of disease risk in order to facilitate early intervention. The identification of predictive relationships between genetic variation, brain structure, and psychiatric phenotypes in children has tremendous potential to aid in the early identification of high-risk youth and to accelerate the development of biologically-based treatments to prevent or mitigate severe psychiatric symptoms.
Our goals:
Gene Discovery
Identify genes that contribute to liability for neuropsychiatric disorders by performing large-scale genome wide association studies (GWAS) in diverse, population representative, multi-ancestry cohorts.
Genomic Profiling
Leverage transcriptomics data to characterize the biological mechanisms (cell types, pathways) through which disease-associated genetic variants impact brain development.
Biomarker Identification
Discover early brain-based markers of neurodevelopmental disorders by linking disease-associated genetic variation with large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging data to elucidate the temporal specificity with which genetic risk for psychiatric disorders impacts brain circuits.
Precision Medicine
Develop personalized projections of patient outcomes and biologically-based interventions by integrating psychiatric genomics, neuroimaging, and clinical symptoms in predictive models.