Daniel Geschwind: UCLA Departments of Human Genetics, Neurology, and Psychiatry

We are interested in understanding how genes influence human cognition and behavior, leading to unique human cognitive specializations, such as language. Advances in molecular and statistical genetics now allow us to identify genes that may be responsible for the emergence of some of these human cognitive features. But convergent approaches relying on data from several levels are necessary to understand a particular gene’s relationship to brain structure and function. To do this, we have undertaken a multidisciplinary approach involving the study of human diseases affecting these features, such as autism, as well as human brain evolution. We have begun to develop methods that try to take into account the systems level organization of gene expression (the transcriptome), and applied these to large scale data sets. This has revealed a previously unrecognized organization to the transcriptional program in brain, which provides a framework on which to understand adaptive changes in gene expression on the human lineage.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/OldhamEtAlNatureNeuroscience.pdf