Jeremy Willsey

Dr. Willsey completed his BSc in Molecular Biology & Biochemistry in 2010 at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. In 2014, he completed a PhD in Genetics at Yale University in Matt State’s lab. After a one year postdoc at UCSF, he became an Assistant Professor under Dr. Stanley Prusiner in the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UCSF, and under Dr. Matthew State in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF.

Dr. Willsey’s research focuses on two complementary areas. He has played a key role in discovering genes contributing to autism and Tourette disorder and will continue to lead a major effort in characterizing the genetic architecture of Tourette disorder. The second arm of his research aims to use the clues provided by these discoveries, along with emerging data on the molecular landscape of human brain development, to understand key aspects of the underlying biology of these disorders. Together with Dr. State, his group has already used these methods to determine that autism risk genes coalesce in a specific part of the brain—the prefrontal cortex—during fetal development in a particular type of cell, the so-called deep layer cortical projection neurons. These two avenues of research not only provide critical information regarding the etiology of these psychiatric disorders, but promise new insights into developing novel treatment approaches. Along with Dr. State and Dr. Nevan Krogan, he has recently founded the Psychiatric Cell Map Initiative at UCSF (pcmi.ucsf.edu), aimed at elucidating the protein-protein, protein-DNA, and genetic interaction networks underlying psychiatric disorders. Dr. Willsey is also part of the TIC Genetics Executive Steering Committee (tic-genetics.org) and leads the committee for Systems Biology & High Throughput Data Generation.