Grant: CIHR Fellowship

A current challenge in brain research is understanding how disorders of the brain and mind, such as autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy, affect the functioning of neurons and brain circuits. Brain disorders are highly clinically relevant to Canada, with autism occurring at a rate of 1 in 150 among children and epilepsy occurring at a rate of 7 in 1000 among adults. In addition to these mental disorders having a large financial cost (approximately $8 billion/year), these diseases have an even greater human and emotional cost to affected individuals and their families. Despite the millions of dollars that Canada annually invests into mental disorders research (and billions spent on this research globally), translating these efforts into knowledge that can directly be applied in the clinic has been challenging. This is because mental disorder research occurs at a number of scales: from studies in mice of individual neurons and brain circuits to studies of genetics and behaviour in humans. Given the vast divide between these methods of observation, mapping the basic research that occurs in animals to knowledge that can be applied to human patients and vice versa has been difficult. My research will use "big data" methods and sophisticated computational analyses to integrate and synthesize diverse datasets from both human and animal studies of neurological disease. For example, I will employ machine algorithms that read thousands of research publications to mine relevant information. I will use these approaches to link how alterations in the genes expressed by neurons in human brain disorders result in altered functioning of neurons and brain circuits. The goal of my methods is to distill complex datasets into knowledge that can be put to use by scientists and clinicians. Thus, my hope is that by making pertinent information more available, I can accelerate the pace of discovery in neuroscience and impact health outcomes for sufferers of neurological disease.