People

Selective Vulnerability in Neurodegenerative Disease

My laboratory studies the onset and spread of neurodegenerative disease. We focus on frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a major cause of early age of onset dementia in which most patients develop social-emotional or language dysfunction and progress to death within 5-8 years of diagnosis. We combine clinical and neuroimaging data from living patients with post-mortem pathological observations in the same patients to build more comprehensive models of disease pathogenesis. 

Current Projects

1. Functional genomics (the ENCODE project): high-throughput CRISPR/Cas9 screening of functional regulatory elements. We are using high-throughput CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genetic screening to interrogate the biological significance of a large number of non-coding regulatory sequences in the mammalian genome in both embryonic stem cells and iPSC-derived neural cell types.

Axon Injury, Disease, and Novel Paradigms for Therapy

Genetics and genomics of developmental neuropsychiatric disorders

The State lab focuses on gene discovery in childhood neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders and then on leveraging these findings to elaborate underlying pathophysiological mechanisms.