Theodorus Van Erp
University of California-Irvine, CA·Neuroscience
Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric illness whose main treatments, antipsychotic drugs, carry serious side effects, do not help roughly a third of patients, and cannot be used to prevent illness in people at risk. Better early identification and better treatments both depend on knowing what is actually different about the brain.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
schizophrenia
schizotypy
psychosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Establish replicated functional and structural connectivity signatures of schizophrenia and of schizotypy (subclinical psychosis-like traits in healthy people) by harmonizing resting-state fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging across dozens of ENIGMA consortium cohorts.
- Determine how these imaging signatures relate to symptom severity and global functioning, testing which abnormalities are shared across the schizophrenia spectrum and which are unique to each end.
- Relate cortical and subcortical structural MRI measures in schizotypy to the pattern of cortical thinning and smaller subcortical volumes seen in schizophrenia, while accounting for confounds such as antipsychotic medication and illness chronicity.
- Build machine-learning models that reduce diagnostic label noise to generate dimensional schizotypy-protective and schizophrenia-liability scores, and test whether these scores predict poor functioning and conversion to psychosis in at-risk individuals.
More about the research
A complication is that the brain differences seen in patients may partly reflect the illness's consequences rather than its causes: years of medication and chronic illness leave their own marks. This project approaches the problem by studying both ends of a continuum, comparing people with schizophrenia to people high in schizotypy, well-functioning individuals who report mild psychosis-like traits without being ill.
Why it matters
Schizophrenia carries an estimated $343.2 billion annual burden in the US, and existing drugs leave many patients without benefit and offer nothing preventive. Imaging-based dimensional scores of liability and resilience, if validated, could help flag which people at clinical high risk will develop psychosis, predict how well patients will function, and give drug developers measurable brain targets instead of relying on diagnostic labels alone.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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