Description:

The Department of Neuroscience Welcomes Dr. Keri Martinowich.

Senior Investigator and Director, Translational Neuroscience, Lieber Institute for Brain Development

Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Spatially-resolved molecular approaches for understanding structure-function relationships in the human brain

This talk will focus on projects that aim to generate data and develop methods for spatially-resolved molecular omics approaches in the context of complex brain disorders. While single cell sequencing approaches have rapidly advanced generation of molecular profiles for various cell types in the brain, a disadvantage of these techniques is the lack of spatial context. Here, I will first describe how we used a combination of data-driven approaches to identify spatial domains within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of the human brain, map cell-cell and circuit interactions across these domains, and map enrichment of cell types and disease-associated profiles to discrete spatial domains.

Brief bio

Dr. Martinowich received a B.A. in International Relations from the George Washington University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following graduate work, she conducted translational research in neuropsychiatry as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins and Lieber Institute for Brain Development where she oversees a research group that takes a cross-species approach to study how programs of gene expression in defined populations of cells contribute to circuit function that is relevant for neuropsychiatric disorders. The lab uses genetic manipulation in combination with molecular, cellular and systems-level techniques in animal models, and integrate these data with cell- and circuit-specific transcriptomic studies in the postmortem human brain and hiPSC-derived culture models