Jens Hjerling Leffler

Neuropsychiatric disorders are common and cause enormous suffering for both patients and their families as well as significant expenses to society. Many of the late-onset psychiatric disorders are diagnosed in the late teens or early twenties and involves perturbation on the brains inhibitory system. We know that the risk for being affected from these disorders are a combination of genetic susceptibility in combination with environmental insults but we have limited understanding on what are the genetic factors and which neuronal networks that affected.

In the Hjerling-Leffler laboratory we study the inhibitory system investigating how individual nerve cells utilize the genetic code differently and how this information translates into the functional identity of cells in their network. We also study how the role of specific cell classes change during adolescent development and what the genetic requirements are for these changes.