Erik Johnsen, MD, PhD Professor of Psychiatry, University of Bergen; Chief Consultant Psychiatrist, Division of Psychiatry, Haukeland University Hospital; Director, Bergen Psychosis Research Group; Center Director, Mohn Research Centre for Psychotic Disorders (MRCP)
Erik Johnsen leads clinical and translational research on psychotic disorders in Bergen, with a focus on personalised treatment strategies, antipsychotic effectiveness, and the biological mechanisms underlying treatment resistance. He directs both the Bergen Psychosis Research Group, which has conducted several landmark randomised antipsychotic trials, and the newly established Mohn Research Centre for Psychotic Disorders (MRCP, launched March 2024), which aims to reduce the 15–20 year life expectancy gap in patients with severe psychotic disorders. He is also one of the Project Leaders at the Mohn Research Centre for Regenerative Medicine (MRCRM), a strategic initiative between Haukeland University Hospital and the University of Bergen supported by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation. Within the MRCRM, he leads the "Personalised Medicine in Psychosis Treatment" project — and it is under this umbrella that we established the first stem cell laboratory within the Division of Psychiatry at Haukeland, bringing iPSC-based disease modelling to a clinical psychiatric environment for the first time. Our functional genomics and stem cell work within the MRCP and MRCRM framework connects genetic risk variants to cellular mechanisms, contributing to the centers' goal of more personalised treatment.
Kristen Brennand, PhD Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine
The Brennand Lab integrates stem cell models with genome engineering to resolve how patient-specific variants drive brain disease across cell types, genetic backgrounds, and environmental conditions. Our collaboration began during Novin's postdoctoral training in the Brennand Lab (2021–2025), where he helped lead a large-scale CRISPR screen for several NDD risk genes across multiple human neuronal cell types. Together, we showed that molecular convergence among NDD risk genes is strongest in mature glutamatergic neurons and unexpectedly targets mitochondrial biology (Garcia, M. et al., Nature Neuroscience). A second collaborative study demonstrated that estradiol selectively rescues network hyperexcitability in a subset of NDD gene knockouts (Pruitt, Yang, Lee, Balafkan et al., bioRxiv 2026). We continue to work closely on extending these findings across multiple cell types.
Ellen J. Hoffman, MD, PhD Associate Professor, Yale Child Study Center and Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine
The Hoffman Lab uses larval zebrafish as a scalable in vivo platform to study how autism risk genes affect brain development, neural circuits, and behavior — and to identify pharmacological interventions that reverse those effects. Our collaboration bridges human stem cell-derived data with whole-organism validation. In the convergence study, Hoffman's zebrafish behavioral profiling provided the critical in vivo test: drug candidates predicted from human neuron transcriptomics were validated through behavioral rescue in zebrafish NDD mutants. This cross-species pipeline continued with a large-scale pharmaco-behavioral screen of 520 FDA-approved drugs in zebrafish ASD gene mutants (Jamadagni et al., PNAS 2026), and a dual-system study showing that estradiol selectively rescues network hyperexcitability in a subset of NDD gene knockouts across human neurons and zebrafish (Pruitt, Yang, Lee, Balafkan et al., bioRxiv 2026). Hoffman is also a co-PI of the NIMH SSPsyGene Consortium (Scalable and Systematic Neurobiology of Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Disorder Risk Genes), a national initiative designed to provide a collaborative and efficient framework for characterizing the neurobiology of 250 genes associated with neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. We are actively exploring how the zebrafish platform can extend to the cross-tissue questions.
Michael Talkowski, PhD Director, Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital; Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School; Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
The Talkowski Lab brings population-scale genomics and computational power to the study of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders, with particular strength in structural variation discovery and functional interpretation of genomic alterations. Our collaboration grew through a multi-site NIH-funded project alongside the Brennand Lab, where Novin served as lead scientist. Over more than three years, he has worked directly with the group's senior computational biologists — Serkan Erdin (Director of Bioinformatics) and Rachita Yadav (Senior data scientist) — to integrate computational analyses with experimental data. This partnership continues as we prepare our main cross-tissue convergence manuscript, combining the Talkowski group's computational genomics expertise with our functional data from human stem cell models.