Epilepsy Journal

Lan Xiong

Lan Xiong
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry
University of Montreal, Canada

Biography

Dr. Xiong had training in both medicine and human genetics in highly ranked education programs and institutions. She has had extensive working experience in human gene mapping, identification and validation in several common neuropsychiatric disorders, including epilepsy syndromes, restless legs syndrome (RLS), schizophrenia and autism. Particularly, her experience and knowledge of identifying and charactering the familial forms of common neuropsychiatric disorders and applying appropriate genetic strategies have led her group to successful gene identifications for several neuropsychiatric disorders. For example, she has been involved in twin and family studies of RLS for many years, and has collected different cohorts of families aggregated with different disease phenotypes that are compatible with Mendelian inheritance, including RLS, schizophrenia and autism. As the Director of the Neurogenetics Laboratory at CR-IUSMM, she has also obtained several major infrastructure funds in Canada; and her lab has set up most genetic technologies and analytical platforms necessary for this project, for example, from Sanger sequencing to single SNP genotyping, from high throughput multiplex SNP genotyping to next generation sequencing targeted resequencing, from bioinformatics to statistical genetic analyses of whole genome genotyping and sequencing data.

Research Interest

Genetic studies of neuropsychiatric disorders, particularly epilepsy, restless legs syndrome, schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder; family and twin studies; genetic linkage and association studies; genomic medicine; molecular genetics.