Director, Translational Neurobiology, Institute Scientist
Dr. Pan has more than 15 years of experience investigating the function, molecular genetics and pharmacology of ion channels. As the Director for Translational Neurobiology at Stanley Center, Dr. Pan aspires to translate the understanding of the genetics and biology of psychiatric and neurological illnesses to novel therapeutics for severe mental illnesses. The research of her group focuses on translating emerging genetics into biology and to enable next-generation therapeutics to treat psychiatric illnesses. In the past few years, Pan has been working on genes whose dysfunction has been implicated for psychiatric illnesses using molecular, cellular, and electrophysiological approaches, both in vitro and in animals. Her group has expertise in the physiology of ion channels, part of the large protein family critical to neurons firing and muscles moving. She leads the ICE-T (ion channel electrophysiology and technology) effort enabled by Broadnext10 initiative to utilize state-of-art technologies for studying ion channels and electrogenic transporters, and to find novel ways to modulate these highly specialized membrane proteins.