Translational Developmental Neuroscience Lab

Welcome to the Translational Developmental Neuroscience Lab (TransDeN Lab) at the Division of Psychological and Social Medicine. We work in close collaboration with Eating Disorder Research and Treatment Center at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus at the TU Dresden.

In our lab, we apply new methods and knowledge from various scientific fields such as molecular biology, endocrinology, experimental psychology and magnetic resonance (MR) physics to study young patients with mental health problems. We believe that understanding the underlying principles of human development and the neural mechanisms associated with psychiatric disorders will help to develop new preventive and therapeutic interventions. Our research interests can be grouped into four main fields of interest:

(1) Within the research field of eating disorders, our research group focusses on experiments concerning the interplay between neuronal circuits, the serotonin system and the changing endocrinological situation of patients with anorexia nervosa (AN; especially in the underweight condition). In order to tease apart effects which are secondary to malnutrition (and hypoleptinaemia) and stable traits that may be linked to the predisposition for AN some of our studies include patients with acute AN and weight-recovered AN patients.

(2) With regard to schizophrenia, our group uses clinical, neurophysiological, genome-wide SNP, DNA methylation and multi-modal imaging data from large-scale multicenter studies on schizophrenia to test new concepts of data reduction and multivariate data analysis. We aim to identify associations between heritable risk-factors and biomarkers of Schizophrenia.

(3) Furthermore, within the field of autism spectrum disorders, we are currently using fMRI to investigate the neural underpinnings of deficits in social and reward processing. 

(4) Last but not least, in the field of immunometabolism, we aim to examine the extent to which the relationship between biological parameters and markers of changing moods is influenced by a change in metabolic and inflammatory markers induced by a lifestyle intervention.

This tag cloud allows for a more detailed glimpse into what our lab is doing and what our publications are about: