Welcome

Michael Gandal, MD PhD
Michael Gandal, MD PhD
Hetznecker Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Perelman School of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania
The Lifespan Brain Institute at Penn Med &
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

We are a diverse team leveraging psychiatric genetics, computational biology, functional genomics, and neuroscience to identify the biological underpinnings of -- and novel therapeutic targets for -- neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, including autism (ASD), ADHD, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Our current work focuses on translating the ever-expanding results from large-scale genetic association studies (GWAS) of neuropsychiatric disorders into tractable biological mechanisms and testable hypotheses. To accomplish this, we are currently working to:

  1. Perform population-level genetic and multi-OMIC profiling of the developing and adult human brain

  2. Develop and apply integrative functional genomic methods to identify the target genes and proximal mechanisms within genetic loci associated with psychiatric disorders

  3. Leverage systems biology to identify pathways of convergence among multiple distinct genetic risk factors, at both a population level and within an individual

  4. Characterize the brain-level molecular pathology of major neuropsychiatric disorders, through gene and network-level inference

Lab Updates