Welcome to the Young-Pearse lab!

Our research focuses on the identification of the mechanistic causes of neurodegenerative and developmental disorders of the nervous system, with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets for therapeutic interventions for these diseases. There is an urgent need for new treatments for psychiatric disorders. However, understanding mental illness at a cell and molecular level is a daunting task, and the field is not yet ready to design drugs targeting the molecular pathways underlying complex disorders of the brain. The identification and study of convergent molecular pathways and cellular processes relevant to human brain diseases will facilitate progress toward the development of new interventions. To this end, our approach involves integrating expression and molecular profiling data from the human brain with genetic and clinical data to identify candidate genes and pathways with high likelihood of relevance to complex brain disorders. Please see our “Projects” section to learn details about active research and the approaches our lab uses to understand the molecular underpinnings of neurodegeneration.