About

Keri Martinowich, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As CSO, Dr. Martinowich provides scientific leadership across the Institute, helping to shape research strategy, guide translational priorities, and accelerate the integration of discovery science with therapeutic development in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.

Dr. Martinowich received a B.A. in International Relations from The George Washington University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her graduate work pioneered studies of activity-dependent epigenetic regulation in the brain, identifying brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) as the first neuronal target of the epigenetic regulator MeCP2 - work that helped establish foundational links between gene regulation, neural plasticity, and neurodevelopmental disease. She subsequently completed postdoctoral training in translational neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where she expanded her research to systems-level analyses of neurotrophin signaling within behaviorally relevant neural circuits.

Since joining the Lieber Institute in 2012, Dr. Martinowich has built and led a multidisciplinary research program that uses a cross-species, intersectional approach to understand how gene expression programs and neural activity within defined cell populations shape circuit function and behavior. Her laboratory integrates spatially resolved transcriptomics, single-cell genomics, computational and data-driven approaches, and experimental models to study molecular and circuit-level mechanisms underlying psychiatric and neurodegenerative disease. A central emphasis of her work is the analysis of postmortem human brain tissue to identify molecular and genetic signatures of disease vulnerability, with validation in human cell-based systems and rodent models.

In addition to her research leadership, Dr. Martinowich plays a key role in advancing LIBD’s translational mission, bridging basic neuroscience, human brain biology, and drug discovery to accelerate progress toward more effective treatments for brain disorders.

Selected publications

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ScxvTx8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao Martinowich K, Hattori D, Wu H, Fouse S, He F, Hu Y, Fan G, Sun YE "DNA methylation-related chromatin remodeling in activity-dependent BDNF gene regulation", Science, 302(5646), 890-893, 2003. Maynard KR, Hill JL, Calcaterra NE, Palko ME, Kardian A, Paredes D, Sukumar M, Adler BD, Jimenez DV, Schloesser RJ, Tessarollo L, Lu B, Martinowich K "Functional role of BDNF production from unique promoters in aggression and serotonin signaling", Neuropsychopharmacology, 41(8) 1943-55, 2016. Maynard KR, Hobbs JW, Phan BN, Gupta A, Rajpurohit S, Williams C, Rajpurohit N, Shin J, Jaffe AE, Martinowich K. “BDNF-TrkB signaling in oxytocin neurons contributes to maternal behavior”, ELife, Sep 7;7, 2018. Hallock HL, Quillian HM, Mai Y, Maynard KR, Hill JL, Martinowich K “Manipulation of a genetically and spatially defined population of BDNF-expressing neurons potentiates learned fear and decreases hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony in mice”, Neuropsychopharmacology, 44(13):2239-2246, 2019. Maynard K, Tippani M, Takahashi Y, Phan B, Hyde T, Jaffe AE, Martinowich K.  “dotdotdot: an automated approach to quantify multiplex single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization (smFISH) images in complex tissues.” Nucleic Acids Research, 48(11):e66, 2020. Hallock HL, Quillian HM, Maynard KR, Mai Y, Chen HY, Hamersky GR, Shin JH, Maher BJ, Jaffe AE, Martinowich K “Molecularly-Defined Hippocampal Inputs Regulate Populations Dynamics in the Prelimbic Cortex to Suppress Context Fear Memory Recall”, Biological Psychiatry, 88(7):554-565, 2020. Maynard K, Collado-Torres L, Weber L, Utyingco C, Barry B, Williams S, Catallini J, Tran M, Besich Z, Tippani M, Chew J, Yin Y, Kleinman J, Hyde T, Rao N, Hicks Martinowich K+, Jaffe AE+. “Transcriptome-scale spatial gene expression in the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” Nature Neuroscience, 2021. +co-corresponding author Tran MN, Maynard KR, Spangler A, Collado-Torres L, Sadashivaiah V, Tippani M, Barry BK, Hancock DB, Hicks SC, Kleinman JE, Hyde TM, Martinowich K+, Jaffe AE+, “Single-nucleus transcriptome analysis reveals cell type-specific molecular signatures across reward circuitry in the human brain”, Neuron, 2021. +co-corresponding author

Research

Dr. Martinowich’s research program focuses on understanding molecular and genetic mechanisms that contribute to risk for neuropsychiatric disorders with the goal of informing development of novel treatments. The lab uses genetic manipulation and viral transgenesis in combination with molecular, cellular and systems-level techniques in animal models of behavior and circuit function, and integrate these data with cell-type specific and spatial transcriptomic studies in the postmortem human brain.

Team members

Want to join our team? We're hiring for: Research Associate Team Members: Svitlana Bach, Staff Scientist I Lionel Rodriguez, Graduate Student (Neuroscience) Matt N. Tran, Research Associate Suhaas Adiraju, Research Assistant Jorge Miranda-Barrientos, Staff Scientist II Lina Oh, Research Associate Aaron Salisbury, Graduate Student (Neuroscience) Sang Ho Kwon, Graduate Student (BCMB) Erik Nelson, Graduate Student (CMM) Anthony Ramnauth, Graduate Student (Neuroscience) WE'RE HIRING! Staff Scientist I--Data Science

Curriculum vitae

Download a copy of my CV here.