Miklos Toth

Miklos Toth is a neuroscientist, professor of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. His laboratory has long been interested in the pathomechanism of neuropsychiatric diseases. The research group uses genetically modified mice to reproduce symptoms of these conditions, including anxiety, hyperactivity disorders, and cognitive and social behavioral abnormalities. They study the contribution of various genetic risk factors in disease pathogenesis. Recently, the Toth laboratory became interested in environmental risk-factors in psychiatric disease (including early adverse care, sedentary lifestyle, chronic societal stress, psychological trauma, and drug use) because environment-induced disease conditions, similar to genetic conditions, can propagate across generations. Although explaining disease pathogenesis and heritability of genetic conditions is relatively straightforward, how adverse environment can cause psychiatric disease is more complicated to understand, as it often occurs long after the exposure and propagate to descendant who were never exposed to the environment. Using mouse models, the Toth Lab aims to build and experimentally test a theoretical framework that explains the principles behind environmentally induced epigenetic alterations that are directly linked to disease pathogenesis (https://www.tothlab.com/, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/miklos.toth.1/bibliography/40692716/public/?sort=date&direction=descending).