Detailed Biography:

Dr. Wexler is an assistant professor in the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and the Semel Institute's Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. Additionally, he is an attending psychiatrist in the UCLA Huntington's Disease Center of Excellence. Dr. Wexler received his MD/PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1998, prior to completing residency and fellowship training in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stanford University, and subsequently, in neurobehavioral genetics at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Wexler joined the UCLA faculty in 2006, where he engages in basic science research and continues to see patients in geriatric psychiatry and neurogenetics out patient clinics.
Dr. Wexler's research focuses on the role of Wnt signaling in adult neurogenesis. He is using human neural stem cells (NSCs) harvested from adult and fetal post-mortem brains as an in vitro model of neuronal regeneration and development. He is exploiting this system to obtain an improved understanding of how manipulating Wnt signals may explain the efficacy of accepted treatments for major mood disorders. Wnts are a diverse family of secreted ligands that are critical to fetal neural development, and continue to be widely expressed throughout the adult brain. The best-characterized ('canonial') Wnts signals inhibits GSK-3?, which in turn, stabilizes beta-catenin, an activator of LEF/TCF family transcription factors. He has shown that lithium, a common mood stabilizer, stimulates neurogenesis by targeting GSK-3b and beta-catenin, thereby mimicking the trophic effects of Wnt signaling. Currently, he is attempting to determine whether other mood stabilizers act similarly, possibly through convergent activation of LEF/TCF. In addition, he is generating new human NSC lines from diseased individuals, with the intent that these may be developed as tractable model systems for genomic and pheomic study of neuropsychiatric disease.