Lab Members

Marquis Vawter PhD
Principal Investigator
mvawter@uci.edu
(949) 824 – 9014

Dr. Vawter is a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior performing preclinical and translational research. He has published over 165 peer-reviewed articles principally in neuroscience and psychiatry. The goals of the laboratory are to understand the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia and mood disorders) and to enable better prevention and treatments of these psychiatric disorders. Dr. Vawter was trained in both clinical and physiological psychology tracks and obtained additional neuroscience and neuropsychological assessment training at NIMH and NIDA. Dr. Vawter started the Functional Genomics Laboratory in 2001 and has been involved in different projects through collaborations with Dr. William E. Bunney and the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium. He is the Senior Associate Director of the UCI Brain Bank and has been in involved in large genetic studies of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He is a member of the Schizophrenia Working Mitochondria SubGroup of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and was part of a multi-center collaborative grant awarded through NIMH Molecular Genetics of Schizophrenia. Dr. Vawter performed the best estimate diagnostician work at UCI for hundreds of subjects, and those samples became part of the NIMH Schizophrenia Genetics Initiative and Molecular Genetics of Schizophrenia Part 1 and Part 2 and the National Institute of Mental Health Genetics Initiative Bipolar Disorder Consortium.

In addition to those genetic projects, Dr. Vawter’s research team members are involved with postmortem brain gene expression in healthy controls, and subjects with mood and psychotic disorders. Phenotypes such as suicide are being investigated in the laboratory led by Dr. Sequeira. A large effort spanning current NIMH funding involves mitochondria gene expression and resequencing of the mitochondria genome in psychiatric disorders. Somatic variation in mitochondria DNA has been discovered to play a role in psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Functional studies of mitochondria involving cellular and animal models are currently underway.

P. Adolfo Sequeira PhD
Assistant Research Professor
psequeir@uci.edu
(949) 824 – 0068

Adolfo’s main interest is to explore the genetic and molecular basis of neuropsychiatric disorders in order to find markers for prevention or for the development of therapeutic interventions. With a background in molecular biology and genetics, he completed a master in neurosciences from the University of Montreal and a PhD in human genetics at McGill University. He arrived as the Della Martin Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour, University of California, Irvine and is currently an Assistant Research Professor in the same department. In his projects he uses a candidate gene approach and a case-control design, to carry out genetic variation studies. He is also involved in gene expression studies of cortical and sub cortical (hippocampus, limbic system) regions from psychiatric subjects (suicides or not) and normal controls. The main purpose of his studies is to explore the relationship between changes in gene expression and genetics in relation to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Brandi Rollins
Lab Manager
bgalke@uci.edu
(949) 824 – 8220

Brandi Rollins graduated from the University of California, Davis with a degree in genetics and is currently the lab manager for the Functional Genomics Laboratory. Her main focus includes the study of human post mortem brain samples and peripheral tissues to investigate psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Her current projects include library preparation for next generation sequencing of the human mitochondria genome. In addition, she measures mitochondria copy number and validates low frequency deletions in subjects with psychiatric disorders.

Ling Morgan MSc
Staff Research Associate
lmorgan@uci.edu
(949) 824 – 9256

Ling has graduated from California State University, Fullerton with an MS degree in Biochemistry and Zhejiang University with a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering, she has worked in the Functional Genomics Laboratory since 2006. Her research involved the quantitative trait locus and brain expression of MHC class II genes and the dissection of postmortem brains for Allen brain atlas. Her current research include the fluorescent microscopy project that using fluorescent dyes and psychiatric drugs in confocal microscopy, monitoring mitochondrial physiologic parameters those respond to drugs as it relate to mitochondrial membrane potential and its capacity to generate ATP. Also include the annotation the mitochondrial sequencing data, using the variety statistical methods and finding the novel mtDNA mutations and identify each haplogroups. She studies enzyme assays that analysis of complex proteins activity and quantitative measurement of NADH and other mitochondrial complex proteins to compare the psychiatric disorder to healthy control subjects.

Firoza Mamdani PhD
Assistant Project Scientist
fmamdani@uci.edu
(949) 824 – 0610

Dr. Mamdani received her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from McGill University where her graduate work focused on the pharmacogenomics of treatment response in mood disorders, specifically the identification of genetic and peripheral gene expression biomarkers for response. She has been in Dr. Vawter’s laboratory since 2011, initially as a postdoctoral fellow, where she has worked on projects involved in mitochondrial DNA sequencing and mtDNA variant investigation in postmortem brain tissue. Her focus now is on studies of stress, cellular aging, and suicide in major depression using postmortem brain tissue, as well as, leading a translational study to identify predictive biomarkers for suicide in a clinically depressed population. She is also collaborating with Dr. Julie V. Patterson to investigate the contribution of genomics and sensory gating to smoking in bipolar disorder.

Sujan Chandra Das PhD
Della Martin Fellow
sujanchd@uci.edu

Sujan’s main research interest is to explore the genetic and synaptic changes associated with neuropsychiatric disorders including suicide, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Sujan completed his M.Pharm in Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Later, Sujan obtained his Ph.D. in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry (Research focus: Alcohol dependence) from the University of Toledo, Ohio. After his PhD, Sujan joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Utah as postdoctoral fellow. Currently, Sujan is the current Della Martin Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California, Irvine under the supervision of Dr. Marquis Vawter and Dr. William Bunney. In his projects, Sujan uses RNA-Seq, dendritic spine analysis, induction of neuron from human fibroblasts, Microscopy (Confocal, FLIM, Light Sheet) approaches to explore druggable molecular targets for treating neuropsychiatric disorders including suicide, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.

Matthieu Weber
Undergraduate Researcher
webermd@uci.edu

Matthieu is a third year undergraduate at UC Irvine majoring in Cell and Developmental Biology. He has been working with the Vawter Functional Genomics Laboratory since his senior year of high school. Matthieu is an aspiring physician and currently works as an EMT instructor. He is an undergraduate research fellow and among other research interests is currently investigating the functional effects of mitochondrial DNA deletions in major depressive disorder.