- About
About
Tomoyo Sawada, Ph.D. joined the Lieber Institute in April 2018. She is investigating how rare genetic variants identified in patients with schizophrenia contribute to human brain development and disease pathogenesis by integrative analysis of human iPS cell-derived brain organoids and postmortem brain tissues with genome editing and single cell analysis techniques. Tomoyo earned her PhD in Medicine from Kyoto University in Japan in 2013. Her dissertation work focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying the maintenance of mitochondrial integrity through PINK1/Parkin-mediated mitophagy. She received specialized training in stem cell research for brain disorders at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, where she studied molecular mechanisms of psychoses using iPS cell-derived brain organoids from discordant monozygotic twins as a postdoctoral fellow, and she continues to pursue questions on neurodevelopmental origins of psychiatric disorders at Lieber Institute.