Donna Werling, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison

SFARI Investigator, SFARI Bridge to Independence Fellow, SFARI Scientific Review Board Website

Donna Werling received her B.S. in psychology from Duke University and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she trained with Dan Geschwind to investigate the relationship between sex-differential biology and genetic risk for ASD using functional genomics, human genetics and bioinformatics tools. For her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco with Stephan Sanders and Matthew State, she worked to develop the Category-Wide Association Study (CWAS) framework for rare variant association testing from whole genome sequencing of autism families, and to characterize developmentally regulated links between genetic variation and gene expression in the human cortex using the BrainVar data resource.

The Werling lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison investigates neurobiological sex differences at the tissue and cellular level in humans and in rodent models of autism-associated genetic risk mutations and early life exposures, to define sex-by-risk factor effects that may contribute to autism’s sex-biased prevalence or presentation. Her group also examines how using advanced human genome references can impact discovery in genetics and functional genomics workflows. The long-term goal of these efforts is to understand the mechanisms underlying sex differences in neurodevelopment and developmental disorder risk.

SFARI Funded Publications

CWAS-Plus: estimating category-wide association of rare noncoding variation from whole-genome sequencing data with cell-type-specific functional data. Kim Y., Jeong M., Koh I.G., Kim C., Lee H., Kim J.H., Yurko R., Kim I.B., Park J., Werling D., Sanders S., An J.-Y.

Developmental dynamics of voltage-gated sodium channel isoform expression in the human and mouse neocortex. Liang L., Fazel Darbandi S., Pochareddy S., Gulden F.O., Gilson M.C., Sheppard B.K., Sahagun A., An J.-Y., Werling D., Rubenstein J., Sestan N., Bender K., Sanders S.

Whole-genome and RNA sequencing reveal variation and transcriptomic coordination in the developing human prefrontal cortex. Werling D., Pochareddy S., Choi J., An J.Y., Sheppard B., Peng M., Li Z., Dastmalchi C., Santpere G., Sousa A. M. M., Tebbenkamp A.T.N., Kaur N., Gulden F.O., Breen M.S., Liang L., Gilson M.C., Zhao X., Dong S., Klei L., Çiçek A. E., Buxbaum J., Adle-Biassette H., Thomas J.L., Aldinger K.A., O'Day D.R., Glass I.A., Zaitlen N.A., Talkowski M., Roeder K., State M., Devlin B., Sanders S., Sestan N.