Christopher M. Bartley, M.D., Ph.D.

The Translational Immunopsychiatry Unit (TIU) studies immune processes that contribute to neuropsychiatric illness. The TIU is interested particularly in identifying autoimmune B and T cell reactivities that cause behavioral pathology. One aim of the lab is to identify rare psychiatric subgroups whose illness is defined by an antigen-specific autoimmune response—thereby helping to parse the staggering heterogeneity of psychiatric illness. A second aim is to develop technologies that demarcate cells and circuits that are vulnerable to autoimmune responses in the human central nervous system. A third focus of the TIU is, in collaboration, to study the pathobiological consequences of immune-antigen interactions at different levels of analysis: structure and biochemistry, neurophysiology, and behavior.

Dr. Bartley is Chief of the Translational Immunopsychiatry Unit. He received his B.S. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology in 2004 from Yale University, where he worked with Dr. Pasko Rakic on molecular regulation of neuronal migration. He received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology in 2014 from Yale University, where he worked with Dr. Angelique Bordey on disrupted molecular pathways in monogentic autism spectrum disorders. He received his M.D. from Yale School of Medicine in 2015, and completed his residency in Adult Psychiatry in 2019 at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is board certified in Psychiatry and continued at UCSF as a research fellow in behavioral immunology, where he worked with Drs. Samuel Pleasure and Michael Wilson on autoantibody discovery in neuropsychiatric disorders. He joined NIMH in the summer of 2022.