Our research focuses on the identification of the mechanistic causes of neurodegenerative and developmental disorders of the nervous system, with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets for therapeutic interventions for these diseases. There is an urgent need for new treatments for psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. However, understanding mental illness at a cell and molecular level is a daunting task, and the field is not yet ready to design drugs targeting the molecular pathways underlying complex disorders of the brain. Similarly, there are numerous molecular pathways that lead to neurodegeneration and diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. The identification and study of convergent molecular pathways and cellular processes relevant to human brain diseases will facilitate progress toward the development of new interventions. To this end, our approach involves integrating expression and molecular profiling data from the human brain with genetic and clinical data to identify candidate genes and pathways with high likelihood of relevance to complex brain disorders. We employ human induced pluripotent stem cell experimental systems to untangle how these genetic variants interact with environmental influences to lead to diseases of the brain.