Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Faculty Recruitment in Developmental Neurobiology

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is seeking support to recruit a developmental neurobiologist with knowledge and expertise in neural circuit development and plasticity to significantly enhance current efforts to understand how neuropsychiatric disorders affect brain function. This scientist will be part of an innovative and multidisciplinary team that combines genetics, mouse models and neuroscience to study the underlying biology contributing to disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. The team is building on groundbreaking efforts by the genetics group at CSHL who have contributed significantly to the field's understanding of genetic variations underlying these disorders. As this group continues to identify new variants associated with disease, including the emerging role of variations in gene copy number, another group at CSHL is using chromosome engineering to model these large genomic duplications and deletions in the mouse. Finally, CSHL neuroscientists are using these mice to determine how these disease-related variants affect brain function. Currently, the neuroscience group at CSHL includes expertise in synaptic physiology, analysis of neural circuits and systems, and cognitive neuroscience. A developmental neurobiologist, with particular interest and expertise in neural circuit development and plasticity, would provide the ideal complement to the team we are building, and recruitment in this area is the highest priority for CSHL. Public Health Relevance: By successfully recruiting a developmental neurobiologist to its program, the CSHL team will be poised to translate genetic discoveries into a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This, in turn, will facilitate further discoveries for improving the treatment and diagnosis of these complex and chronic conditions.