Publications

Individuals with schizophrenia can experience auditory hallucinations and delusions, as well as disrupted cognitive and sensory processes that may result in functional impairment and long-term disability. In the cerebral cortex, pyramidal cells are essential to the cognitive and sensory processes that may be disrupted in schizophrenia. Postmortem studies of individuals with schizophrenia consistently show deficits...

Acute stressors affect how we perceive the world, allocate our mental energy, and make decisions. Although the prefrontal cortex is known to be an essential brain region involved in adaptive behaviors related to stress, our understanding of the individual cell types and synaptic plasticity mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex is limited. In a recent study published in Neuron, a team of investigators including co...

Among scientists working in the field of autism spectrum disorder research, two models represent the most common understanding of the disorder’s genetic underpinnings: one posits that rare risk variants invariably have large impact on liability; the other emphasizes the major role played by common variations with small effects. On a population level, the common variation likely plays the dominant role in liability...

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a familial illness that is associated with functional impairment and increased risk for suicide and substance use. The disorder is highly heritable, and research has identified many common genetic variants associated with risk for the disorder. Studies including the Pittsburgh Bipolar Offspring Study (BIOS) have found that offspring of parents with BD are at elevated, specific risk to...

Determining how brain activity gives rise to compulsive behaviors is vital for understanding the neural underpinnings of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD display disrupted performance and abnormal lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity during reversal learning tasks, yet it is unknown whether compulsions and reversal learning deficits share a common neural substrate. A group of investigators...

Neuroimaging studies of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide invaluable insights into the changes underlying neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, but frequently combine data collected from multiple scanners and experimental conditions. These conditions can yield data containing substantial technical variability and biases due to differences in sites, scanners, and image...