Assistant Professor

Research Areas
Uncovering Mechanisms of Neuropsychiatric Disease Using Zebrafish

Biography

My long-term research goals are to uncover the molecular basis of complex neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases and eventually create therapies. I have a broad background in biochemistry, molecular biology, and neurobiology. To gain a fundamental understanding of protein structure and function and the skills to engineer therapeutics, I joined David Baker’s protein modeling lab for my graduate studies (2006-2012). I fused computational and experimental approaches to redesign biomolecular interactions, mastering a wide range of techniques including enzymology, directed protein evolution, multiple coding languages, and high-throughput computing.

As a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Research Fellow and K99 recipient in Dr. Alexander Schier’s lab (2012-2019), I established expertise with zebrafish and laid the groundwork for my proposed research on the pathways regulated by genes associated with psychiatric disorders. Zebrafish is an ideal model vertebrate for large-scale genetic and neurodevelopmental studies, as well as high-throughput drug screens. I generated over a hundred zebrafish mutants for schizophrenia-associated genes and assessed their brain activity, brain structure, and behavior. In preparing for this screen, I optimized the efficiency of Cas9-mediated mutagenesis in zebrafish, uncovered rules for Cas9 gRNA design, and made an unexpected discovery about embryonic DNA repair. From the study of over a hundred mutants, I uncovered shared phenotypes and phenotypes that relate to patient physiology, including altered forebrain development and decreased prepulse inhibition. These findings highlighted the most likely candidates in multi-gene loci and prioritized genes for further study. This screen provided the foundation for my independent lab, as I will now decipher the detailed molecular and developmental functions of the most interesting candidates.

Education

Graduate School
Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry, University of Washington 2012

Postdoctoral Fellowship
Harvard University

Contact

Email
sthyme@uab.edu

Phone
205.934.9605