Donna Werling, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison

SFARI Investigator, SFARI Bridge to Independence Fellow Website

Donna Werling is interested in characterizing sex-differential risk mechanisms in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). During her doctoral work in the laboratory of Dan Geschwind at the University of California, Los Angeles, Werling used functional genomics, human genetics and bioinformatics approaches to understand the relationship between sex and genetic risk in ASD.

During postdoctoral work in the laboratories of Matt State and Stephan Sanders at the University of California, San Francisco, Werling continued working on mechanisms underlying sex differences in ASD, while also expanding her expertise on ASD genetic risk through her collaborative efforts to develop the Category-Wide Associate Study (CWAS), an analytical framework for association testing of functional defined categories of coding and noncoding de novo variants.

Werling will utilize the expertise gained over the course of her Ph.D. and postdoctoral training to characterize sex differences at both the cellular and tissue level in both ASD mouse models and individuals with ASD to understand the mechanisms underlying male bias in ASD prevalence.

SFARI Funded Publications

CWAS-Plus: estimating category-wide association of rare noncoding variation from whole-genome sequencing data with cell-type-specific functional data. Kim Y., Jeong M., Koh I.G., Kim C., Lee H., Kim J.H., Yurko R., Kim I.B., Park J., Werling D., Sanders S., An J.-Y.

Developmental dynamics of voltage-gated sodium channel isoform expression in the human and mouse neocortex. Liang L., Fazel Darbandi S., Pochareddy S., Gulden F.O., Gilson M.C., Sheppard B.K., Sahagun A., An J.-Y., Werling D., Rubenstein J., Sestan N., Bender K., Sanders S.

Whole-genome and RNA sequencing reveal variation and transcriptomic coordination in the developing human prefrontal cortex. Werling D., Pochareddy S., Choi J., An J.Y., Sheppard B., Peng M., Li Z., Dastmalchi C., Santpere G., Sousa A. M. M., Tebbenkamp A.T.N., Kaur N., Gulden F.O., Breen M.S., Liang L., Gilson M.C., Zhao X., Dong S., Klei L., Çiçek A. E., Buxbaum J., Adle-Biassette H., Thomas J.L., Aldinger K.A., O'Day D.R., Glass I.A., Zaitlen N.A., Talkowski M., Roeder K., State M., Devlin B., Sanders S., Sestan N.