Faculty

Dr. Glatt is Director of the Psychiatric Genetic Epidemiology & Neurobiology Laboratory (PsychGENe Lab).  The mission of the PsychGENe Lab is to develop and apply methods for finding the causes of mental health and mental illness.  The vision of the lab is that we will discover those causes and use that information to design interventions that treat or prevent these disorders, or foster resilience to them.  We are running numerous research projects aimed at finding the genes and environmental risk factors for a wide variety of disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and substance abuse disorders, among others.  Our pipeline seeks to identify “risk genes” for these disorders by studying affected individuals and families and then to reveal how such genes alter brain biology leading to a vulnerability to mental illness.

The signal transduction events that regulate the functional organization of neurons in the brain, and the phenotypes caused by defects in the genes that encode these signaling molecules.

Molecular studies of brain malformations.

Visual transduction, Gene Expression, Membrane proteins

Dr. Liu's major research focuses on identifying the molecular mechanisms of major psychiatric diseases, particularly bipolar disorder and schizophrenia using  comprehensive approaches including genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, cellular and animal models.

Role of glycoproteins in oncogenesis and brain development

• 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) 

Cellular and molecular mechanisms of cerebral cortex development.

Lissencephaly / neuronal migration disorders; Dendritogenesis and early cortical wiring; Reelin-Dab1 signaling; Adaptor proteins; Fetal Alcohol Syndrome;  Intellectual disability

Neuronal mechanisms of visual perception, studied through physiological, anatomical and functional imaging techniques.

Neuronal survival and development.

Brain cancer therapies; tumor microenvironment; tumor invasion; extracellular matrix; nano-therapeutics; immunotherapies

Mammalian retinal stem cells formation; molecular mechanism of retinal cell fate decisions; using cell replacement therapy to heal the blinded eye.

I research the Neurobiology of Mental Illness with a focus on Schizophrenia. My research also involves projects on Primate Neurogenesis, Neuroinflammation, and Molecular Human Brain Development.

Brain plasticity; molecular, cellular and functional mechanisms of brain repair in stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, CADASIL, and traumatic brain injury; live brain imaging; stem cell biology.

Genetic mechanisms of Drosophila neural stem cell self-renewal and specification.

The molecular basis of retinal stem cell formation; regulating retinal stem/progenitor cell proliferation; using retinal stem/progenitor cells to heal the injured or degenerating retina.