Dr. Tarik Haydar, Director of the Center for Neuroscience Research at CNRI, studies development and function of the cerebral cortex. He obtained a B.S. in Microbiology at Umass Amherst, a PhD in Neuroscience at Umaryland School of Medicine, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale Medical School. His lab uses cellular and molecular approaches to study how early development affects later intellectual function. With a variety of animal models and postmortem human samples, the Haydar lab uses single cell genomics to uncover specific markers and gene pathways used by cell types in the developing brain. In vivo probes for these cell types are then constructed and delivered via fetal surgeries to specifically label and mechanistically study the role of these cells using genetic fate mapping, imaging and electrophysiological techniques. In addition, the Haydar lab investigates the alterations in brain development that are found in Down syndrome to uncover the causes of intellectual disability in people with this complex genetic disorder.