Dr. Narjes Rohani

RESEARCH

Understanding brain disorders at the level of mechanism

My research is centred on understanding how genetic variation, regulatory state, cell identity, and developmental timing interact to produce brain disorders. I work across common and rare neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, using large-scale multi-omic data from human brain tissue to trace disease mechanisms and identify therapeutic opportunities.

Research group meeting at Oxford

RESEARCH IN PRACTICE

From brain tissue data to therapeutic hypotheses

Large-scale multi-omic datasets can reveal when disease-associated molecular programs emerge. The next step is to connect those signals to mechanisms that can be tested and translated.

01 · CURRENT

Brain disorders and therapeutic target discovery

Multi-omicsHuman brain tissueRegulatory genomicsCommon & rare disorders

Research question: How do genetic risk and regulatory state interact across developmental time to create vulnerable cell states and disease phenotypes, and which mechanisms are sufficiently specific and tractable to become therapeutic targets?

Approach: Integrate transcriptomic, epigenomic, chromatin-accessibility, and DNA-sequencing data across developmental stages and cell types. Computational genomics and machine learning are used to connect disease-associated variants to regulatory programs, identify candidate cis-regulatory elements, and determine when and where disease-associated molecular changes emerge.

Therapeutic direction: Move from statistical association to functional mechanism by prioritising regulatory elements for experimental perturbation, including CRISPRa/i. The longer-term aim is to make precision medicine for brain disorders more feasible by linking an individual’s genetic variation to the specific regulatory mechanisms that can be targeted.

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