Joseph Dougherty, PhD
Washington University in St. Louis
Profile
About the Speaker: Joseph Dougherty is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis in the departments of Genetics and Psychiatry, Co-director of the Neuroscience Program, and Co-director of the Intellectual and Developmental Disability Research Center. In his research lab, he has built a team with a unique technical expertise, applying high-throughput molecular and behavioral analysis to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurological diagnoses, focusing on neurodevelopmental diagnoses such as intellectual disability and autism.
Dougherty was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral fellow, a neuroscience student with Daniel Geschwind at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Nathaniel Heintz at Rockefeller University. During his PhD and postdoctoral training, Dougherty gained extensive experience in high-throughput methodologies for transcript profiling and in vitro and in vivo analyses. This included developing and applying analytical methods for high throughput in vivo studies of genetically defined cell types in mice, culminating in a broad survey of translational profiles across dozens of cell types in the CNS. His lab now conducts extensive tool development for molecular neuroscience with a focus on assays for cell type specific epigenetics, transcription, and translation. They couple human molecular genetic analysis with these skills in mouse genetics and genomics to the study of neurological disease, notably autism. This includes studies using TRAPseq, CLIPseq, Calling Cards, and Ribosome Footprinting for molecular work, and a wide variety of behavioral analyses. A focus in recent years is bringing functional genomics approaches into the CNS to assess human genetic variants discovered in neurogenetic studies. In all, this scientific background provides a unique combination of expertise in cellular, molecular and behavioral neuroscience to apply to understanding the neurobiological mechanisms mediating the genetic contribution to neurodevelopment in health and disease.
For Further Information, Contact: Clark Kellogg at kellogg@waisman.wisc.edu
The seminar series is funded by the John D. Wiley Conference Center Fund, the Friends of the Waisman Center and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant P50HD105353.
