Faculty

Acquired/developmental learning disorders, childhood peer relations, brain:behavior relations, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorders

Professor Faraone has been studying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for three decades.  This topic has been of much interest to him because of the disorder’s high prevalence, its association with marked distress and disability in childhood and adulthood and its personal impact on my family.  His research has several foci. One line of work seeks to discover new biological pathways that will, eventually, improve the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder. To achieve this goal, he has been coordinating an international network of researchers that has discovered several genes that cause the disorder.  He his also conducting in depth studies of the SLC9A9 gene to better understand its functioning and how it’s disruption leads to neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and autism. Because ADHD is also associated with aggressive behavior, substance use disorders and mood/anxiety disorders, Prof Faraone is studying the genetics of these comorbidities along with methods to predict which ADHD youth are at highest risk for these disorders. Results from these studies are disseminated via scientific publications, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PtJmhRwAAAAJ, and via http://adhdinadults.com/, for which he is Program Director.

Biomarkers for Psychosis in Velocardiofacial Syndrome (NIMH Grant)

Child Psychiatric Diagnosis & Treatment by Primary Care Providers

Development of:

• Extremely low-dose and high-resolution tomographic reconstruction methods in PET and SPECT
• Advanced ultrafast PET detector
• Advanced very high-sensitivity and high-spatial resolution brain PET scanner
• Ultrafast laser-based betatron microfocal x-ray source for very high-resolution biomedical imaging
• PET bioprobe for detection and treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and other cancers
• Advanced breast cancer detection methods in mammography

• Genetic, epigenetic, and neuroanatomical basis of neurological and psychiatric disorders
• Basal ganglia and cerebellar circuitry in normal and disease states
• Neural-immune and gut-brain interactions
• Machine learning approaches for biomarker discovery
• Next generation sequencing for multiomic data analysis (genome, transcriptome, microbiome, methylome)