Our research.
Dissecting neural-immune mechanisms of autism and psychosis.
Growing evidence implicates altered neural-immune signaling in the pathophysiology of several heritable neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. By systematically integrating genetic, transcriptomic, and neuroimaging data, we are working to elucidate how individual differences in neural-immune gene expression affect structural brain development during childhood and adolescence.
Understanding how genetic and environmental factors impact heterogeneity in brain development.
Previous genome wide association (GWAS) studies have shown that there are hundreds of genes associated with common psychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia. We are interested in understanding how these genetic variants impact longitudinal trajectories of brain develop to result in a spectrum of symptoms and co-occurring conditions that emerge over the course of development.
Multi-ancestry GWAS to identify genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders in diverse populations.
Over the past two decades there has been a large increase in the number of GWAS studies performed for brain and psychiatric disorders. Yet, while the average sample size of GWAS in Europeans has continued to grow, sample sizes in other populations have remained small. To address this problem, we are performing multi-ancestry GWAS of autism and other common neurodevelopmental disorders using large-scale population biobanks and electronic health records data.