Michael Gandal, M.D., Ph.D.

Michael Gandal is an associate professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Genetics within the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Lifespan Brain Institute at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). As a practicing psychiatrist, he specializes in the treatment of adolescents and adults with neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, including autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Gandal directs a developmental neurogenomics research laboratory, which leverages large-scale genetic and genomic approaches to better understand the biological mechanisms contributing to — and novel treatment approaches for — developmental neuropsychiatric conditions. He received his B.S. in engineering (biomedical computation) from Stanford University and his M.D./Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. His graduate studies involved using electrophysiology to investigate neural circuit dysfunction in mouse models of schizophrenia and autism. He completed residency training in psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and a postdoctoral fellowship in neurogenetics in the laboratory of Dan Geschwind, characterizing the genetic contributions to shared gene expression alterations in the human brain across several major psychiatric disorders.

Gandal has published more than 65 manuscripts to date, including in leading scientific journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. His research has been featured on national news outlets, including CNN, NPR, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. His work was recognized by both Autism Speaks and Spectrum as among the Top 10 most notable papers in 2018. In 2020, he received the Theodore Reich Early Career Investigator of the Year Award from the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics.