Welcome

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:
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Perform population-level genetic and multi-OMIC profiling of the developing and adult human brain
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Develop and apply integrative functional genomic methods to identify the target genes and proximal mechanisms within genetic loci associated with psychiatric disorders
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Leverage systems biology to identify pathways of convergence among multiple distinct genetic risk factors, at both a population level and within an individual
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Characterize the brain-level molecular pathology of major neuropsychiatric disorders, through gene and network-level inference
Lab Updates
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Pan's paper accepted at PNAS!
"Neuron-specific transcriptomic signatures indicate neuroinflammation and altered neuronal activity in ASD temporal cortex" PDF
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Congrats to Arjun Bhattacharya, Oral Presentation Winner at WCPG2022!
Check out his preprint on our isoTWAS method
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Congrats to Leanna Hernandez, named SFARI Bridge to Independence Fellow!
She will be starting her independent lab soon at UCLA!