SFARI

Hilary Coon is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Utah. Her work has focused on gene discovery for complex disorders, including 20 years of experience with genetic analyses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Local ASD research has focused on very large, extended, high-risk families with ASD ascertained through the Utah Population Database. Work with these unique families has included development of innovative analytical methods and analyses of sequence data together with extensive quantitative and qualitative phenotypes measured on affected and unaffected family members.

Yu-Ju Chen is a neuroscientist who studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms of pathophysiology underlying neurodevelopmental disorders. He has a doctorate in biomedical science. After completing Ph.D. training in Guo-Jen Huang’s laboratory at Chang Gung University in Taiwan, he joined Hye Young Lee’s laboratory at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2022. He focuses on the following areas of research: 1) identifying the molecular and cellular mechanisms responsible for the pathophysiology underlying fragile X syndrome, and 2) using non-viral vector to deliver Cas9 mRNA/sgRNA to develop potential therapeutics in mouse models for brain disorders. To address these questions, he uses molecular and cellular neurobiology tools, bioengineering and animal behavioral assays.

Ugne Klibaite is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Ranmal Aloka Samarasinghe is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. He performed his thesis research in the laboratory of Donald DeFranco, where he studied nongenomic actions of glucocorticoid hormones in neural progenitor cells.

Timothy (Tim) O’Connor is a professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences and a member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health and International Collaborations On Repair Discoveries (ICORD).