Vladimir Vladimirov, MD, PhD

Dr. Vladimirov is a physician-scientist with over two decades of experience in the post-mortem brain research area of psychiatric disorders. Through his collaboration with the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Dr. Vladimirov has access to over 4,000 post-mortem brains from patients with psychiatric disorders and neurotypical controls. Dr. Vladimirov uses these brains to uncover the genetic and epigenetic factors contributing to the neuropathology of psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression) and substance abuse. Specifically, Dr. Vladimirov has a long-term research interest in understanding the miRNAs’ role in the control of gene expression in the brain and how these small RNA species contribute to the etiopathology of psychiatric disorders. In the last decade, in collaboration with colleagues from the Lieber Institute and Medical University-Sofia, Bulgaria, Dr. Vladimirov has led an international collaboration to study the genetic and molecular factors involved in normal and diseased neurodevelopment.

Another important research topic from Dr. Vladimirov’s research is understanding the functional impact of risk genetic variants identified through mega-GWAS of psychiatric disorders on miRNA and gene expressions. In the last few years, Dr. Vladimirov’s research has also focused on developing novel computational approaches for miRNA and gene expression imputation using GWAS and single-cell transcriptomic data. Dr. Vladimirov is also a past and current recipient of both private and federal funding, with Dr. Vladimirov currently being the PI of three R01s from NIH.