Welcome to the Montalvo-Ortiz Lab!

To advance the understanding of the genetic and epigenetic architecture as a way to dissect the underlying mechanisms of the complex interplay between genes and environment that contributes to an increased risk for psychiatric disorders.

We are committed to scientific excellence, work ethic, creativity, innovation, and societal relevance of our findings. We foster an environment that that promotes collaboration, networking, career development, mentorship, and sponsorship.

Our ultimate goal is to support and train the next generation of scientists, equipping them to carry forward our mission and lead impactful research to uncover the biological foundations of psychiatric disorders.

Our group is focused on understanding the genomic and epigenomic architecture of neuropsychiatric disorders.

We use cutting-edge approaches to dissect the epigenomic landscape of psychiatric disorders in human peripheral and postmortem brain tissue. We focused on studying substance use disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and major depression, and related traits.. Multi-omics datasets (genomics, methylomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) are investigated to better understand the underlying mechanisms and identify predictors or biomarkers for these disorders.

We also seek to advance psychiatric genomics in Latin American populations based on our work in the Latin American Genomics Consortium (LAGC) and Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). The main goals include 1) increasing sample size of genomic studies by meta-analysis, 2) recruitment and genotyping of new samples, 3) methods development and 4) education and training.

Our work is funded by the National Institute of Health and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

National Institutes of Health

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs