Avram Holmes
Department of Psychiatry
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS)
Research in my laboratory focuses on discovering the fundamental organization of large-scale human brain networks. A core motivation that drives this work is the search for specific network-level signatures or “fingerprints” that co-vary with heritable behavioral variation in the general population and mark vulnerability for psychiatric illness onset. To date, research on the biological origins of psychopathology has largely focused on discrete illness categories. Although patient groups within this diagnostic system are treated as distinct entities, there are often murky boundaries between health and disease and across the disorders themselves. To establish the etiology of these complex syndromes, we must account for diagnostic heterogeneity, both relatively selective and disorder-spanning symptoms, and the dimensional nature of genetic risk.
In this talk, I will present converging lines of research from my laboratory that aim to identify neurobiological markers of psychiatric illness. First, I will discuss our recent efforts to link individual variability across the collective set of functional brain connections with the nature and severity of symptom profiles across unipolar depression, bipolar depression, and schizophrenia. Second, I will discuss a pending research project where we will seek to identify cellular and genetic contributors to the functioning of large-scale brain networks and characterize their relationship to longitudinal trajectories of clinical presentation in patients with affective and psychotic illnesses.