Welcome to Kim Lab. My lab focuses on a fundamental question in psychiatry: “how do disparate mutations lead to similar neuropsychiatric behavioral symptoms?” To address this question, we have been investigating neural circuit pathologies that drive comorbid endophenotypes associated with psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia (SZ) and autism-spectrum disorder (ASD). The central hypothesis of our research is that abnormal behavior is due to perturbations within a common neural circuit, which is shared across different psychiatric disorders driven by various gene mutations. To test this hypothesis, my lab exploits a circuit-specific gene manipulation approach in vivo. Using this innovative method, we knockout/knockin a gene within a neural circuit and investigates the functional characteristics of circuit neurons as well as monitors behavioral phenotypes. We anticipate that our approach will unveil a potential common pathogenic brain network, which drives the behavioral abnormality reported in several mouse models of psychiatric conditions.