Armin Raznahan, M.D., Ph.D.

The Section on Developmental Neurogenomics (SDN) is dedicated to better understanding the biology of childhood-onset neuropsychiatric disorders in ways that might ultimately help to improve disease prediction, detection and treatment. Together with our collaborators, we work towards this goal in two mutually-informative ways.

First, we use large-scale neuroimaging datasets to study the architecture of brain development in healthy volunteers. By modeling how neuroimaging measures of the human brain vary with age, sex and behavior in health, we hope to advance basic developmental neuroscience while also providing a data-driven way of selecting neuroimaging measures that should be prioritized for study in atypically developing groups.

Second, we use a “genetics-first” strategy to study the relationship between atypical brain development and neuropsychiatric symptoms. This effort involves gathering “deep-phenotypic” data (spanning measures of gene expression, brain structure/function, psychophysiology, cognition and behavior) in diverse genetic disorders which all increase risk for neuropsychiatric impairment. Guided by knowledge of typical development, we harness these clinical data to empirically dissect the diverse biological pathways that can contribute to the emergence of neuropsychiatric syndromes.

Cross-cutting themes of special interest within our Section include sex-differences, allometry, and structure-function relationships within the central nervous system.

Armin Raznahan, MD, PhD, is Chief of the Section on Developmental Neurogenomics (SDN). His research combines neuroimaging, genomic and bioinformatic techniques to better understand the architecture of human brain development in health, and in neurogenetic disorders that increase risk for psychiatric symptoms. Dr. Raznahan has a degree in Medicine and a PhD in Biological Psychiatry from King’s College University London, UK. He completed residencies in pediatrics and psychiatry, and a specialist fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, London, UK. Dr. Raznahan trained with Drs. Jay Giedd and Judith Rapoport as a postdoc at NIMH, and is an alumnus of the NIH-Lasker Clinical Research Scholars tenure-track program.

Dr. Raznahan is a member of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists, the UK Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of NeuroImage, the ACNP Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, and the AXYS (Association for X- and Y-Chromosome Variations) Clinical & Research Advisory Committee. Dr. Raznahan has received the NIMH Director’s Award for Outstanding Mentorship, as well as awards from ACNP (Eva King-Killam Award for Translational Research) and the American Psychopathological Association (Robins-Guze Award).