Leanna Hernandez is an assistant professor-in-residence at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience in the laboratory of Mirella Dapretto, where her dissertation work used magnetic resonance imaging to characterize the impact of genetic variability in the OXTR gene on neurobiological heterogeneity and sex-differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Michael Gandal and Andrew Fuligni at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Hernandez continued to conduct multidisciplinary research at the intersection of human neuroimaging, behavior and genetics. Using human brain transcriptomic and genetic data to impute brain gene expression, her postdoctoral research characterized the consequences of genetically driven upregulation of the immune-related complement signaling pathway in the human brain and how it relates to the emergence of psychiatric symptoms during childhood.