Professor Cyndi Shannon Weickert

The Schizophrenia Research Laboratory (jointly supported by Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales) endeavours to delineate the basis of schizophrenia, a devastating mental illness which first manifests during adolescence, by bridging the molecular neurodevelopmental and cognitive neuronal systems approaches.

Schizophrenia causes profound withdrawal from family and friends, decreases in intellectual ability, hallucinations and delusions. Our view is that a derailment of the normal maturational program that occurs during the second decade of life in humans underlies schizophrenia. However, very little is known about the normal cellular and molecular developmental changes that occur in the human brain at this important time and how these changes may influence cognitive processes and the development of schizophrenia.

Our primary focus is to understand how genetic variants of hormone receptors and growth factors impact the development and function of the primate cerebral cortex during adolescence and how these factors may be altered in schizophrenia. Genetic variants of several developmentally important genes have been associated with schizophrenia, however the mechanism by which these variants lead to the disease is unknown.

Currently, we are exploring the molecular mechanism of how alterations in estrogen receptor and neuregulin may act to bring about schizophrenia by examining human brain tissue and primary neuronal culture. We are also directly analyzing human genomic DNA and performing comparative genomic studies that are aimed at more clearly pinpointing DNA sequence variations in susceptibility genes that may be critical in determining the vulnerability to schizophrenia.

We are also testing how the pubertal hormonal surge influences the expression of susceptibility genes and how this surge may drive normal molecular and social development of the non-human primate.

Interested in doing a postgraduate degree in neuroscience, psychiatry, or mental illness research? Click here and contact Prof Shannon Weickert to develop a research proposal.