Description of Clinical Expertise
I am a psychiatrist who worked mainly with treatment-resistant outpatients suffering from schizophrenia. Since moving in July, 2012 from Cornell Medical College to UPenn/The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, I am not seeing patients as I focus on laboratory research into the causes of neuropsychiatric illnesses.
Description of Research Expertise
I am a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia-based faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at UPenn.
The focus of my laboratory concerns the molecular and cellular mechanisms that govern the development of the mammalian forebrain. We use mouse genetics, forebrain slice and dissociated culture techniques, as well as mouse and human pluripotent stem cells in cell culture and transplantation experiments to study the fate determination of interneurons of the cerebral cortex. We are particularly interested in understanding the molecular underpinnings behind the fate determination of subclasses of GABAergic interneurons implicated in the neuropathology of autism and schizophrenia. In addition, we are using mouse and human stem cell-derived interneurons in animal models of cell-based therapies for seizures, psychosis, and as tools for the study of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions in neuropsychiatric disease. Additional projects include the study of mitochondria in stem cell derived neurons derived from people with the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and schizophrenia, and the study of human stem cell derived microglia infected with HIV.