- About
About
Rahul Bharadwaj, Ph.D. is Section Head, Brain Processing and Neuropathology, with a focus on postmortem human brain circuit- and cell-specific molecular research at LIBD, Neuropathology. His everyday responsibilities include postmortem brain anatomical dissection and pathology evaluation for Drs. Hyde, Paltan-Ortiz and Castellani (Neuropathology). He has also standardized the laser capture microdissection (LCM) approach to study the molecular profile of specific brain cells, including midbrain dopamine neurons and hippocampal (pyramidal and dentate granular layers) cells with a clinical focus on schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease (PI: Dr. Hyde). He serves as a co-Investigator on a multi-site PTSD R01 project (PI: Drs. Kleinman and Weinberger) aimed at the discovery of PTSD targets using multi-omics datasets from postmortem brain tissue. His graduate thesis (Mount Sinai School of Medicine & UMass Medical School, PI: Dr. Akbarian) was focused on understanding how epigenetics influenced chromatin dynamics and gene expression regulation in schizophrenia subject postmortem brains. He has the distinction of pioneering the application of the ‘Chromosome Conformation Capture – 3C’ technique in postmortem human brain tissue with publications appearing in Neuron [84(5):997-1008] and The Journal of Neuroscience 33(29):11839-51, amongst others. The Schizophrenia Research Forum covered his novel findings at the GAD1 genetic locus in a news article (http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/new/detail.asp?id=1936). He gained postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the subjects of neuropathology and neuroanatomy. He has completed his training at LIBD, after processing over a thousand postmortem human brain donations of multiple neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diagnoses.