Dr. Mirnics’s laboratory has had a long-time interest in expression profiling of schizophrenia, focusing on disturbed molecular patterns in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Neuroimmune and synaptic changes in schizophrenia are of particular interest to the laboratory, and the human postmortem findings are correlated with the effects of intrauterine immune activation on the brain across mouse models. The laboratory has been involved in various Alzheimer’s disease, autism, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis-related research projects, as well as in the development of novel DNA microarray and transgenic mouse technologies. More recently, Dr. Mirnics and his team have been generating and analyzing novel transgenic mice that model the gene expression findings observed in the human brains of subjects with schizophrenia.

Dr. Mirnics joined Vanderbilt after teaching at the University of Pittsburgh for five years, where he established his independent laboratory in 2000.