Appointments
Chair & Professor of Neurobiology
Biography
Genevieve Konopka, Ph.D., became Chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, effective July 1, 2025.
Dr. Konopka was Professor and Vice Chair of Neuroscience, the Jon Heighten Scholar in Autism Research, and the Townsend Distinguished Chair in Research on Autism Spectrum Disorders at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Dr. Konopka received dual B.S. degrees in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biology from MIT and completed her Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Harvard University. She also completed fellowships in developmental biology with Dr. Stephen Duncan at Medical College of Wisconsin and in neurogenetics with Dr. Dan Geschwind at UCLA.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, a Basil O’Connor Scholar Award from the March of Dimes, a Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and an Understanding Human Cognition Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. The research in the Konopka lab focuses on understanding the molecular pathways important for human brain evolution that are at risk in cognitive disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her lab uses a combination of human neurons, animal models, and primate comparative genomics to uncover human-specific, disease-relevant patterns of gene expression. Recent work in her lab integrates gene expression with signatures of neuronal activity in the human brain. The Konopka lab is also part of the international Human Cell Atlas effort to map gene expression in every cell of the human body.
Publications
- Huang, H, Charron, TL, Fu, M, Dunn, M, Jones, DM, Kumar, P et al.. Resilience to Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Mitigates Membrane Hyperexcitability Underlying Late Disease Onset in a Murine Model of SCA6. Ann Neurol. 2025; :. doi: 10.1002/ana.78042. PubMed PMID:40990218 .
- Diederich, NJ, Brüne, M, Allen, JS, Bender, N, Bruner, E, Changeux, JP et al.. Buried Treasure? Overlooked and Newly Discovered Evolutionary Contributions to Human Brain Diseases. Ann Neurol. 2025; :. doi: 10.1002/ana.78030. PubMed PMID:40964844 .
- Moore, H, Dehnad, M, Freelin, A, Granger, B, Subramanian, S, Kulkarni, A et al.. Stimulation modulates cell assemblies linked with gene networks in the human temporal cortex ex vivo. bioRxiv. 2025; :. doi: 10.1101/2025.06.25.661589. PubMed PMID:40667174 PubMed Central PMC12262240.
- Caglayan, E, Konopka, G. Decoding DNA sequence-driven evolution of the human brain epigenome at cellular resolution. Nat Commun. 2025;16 (1):5625. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60665-w. PubMed PMID:40595532 PubMed Central PMC12216504.
- Liu, Y, Fontenot, MR, Kulkarni, A, Khandelwal, N, Voth Park, SHE, Criswell, C et al.. Human CLOCK enhances neocortical function. Nat Neurosci. 2025;28 (8):1716-1728. doi: 10.1038/s41593-025-01993-4. PubMed PMID:40588680 .