Mount Sinai Neuroscience — Friedman Brain Institute / Nash Family Department
Overview
The neuroscience enterprise at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is organised under the Friedman Brain Institute and the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience. Key centres include the Pamela Sklar Division of Psychiatric Genomics (GWAS, brain transcriptomics and epigenomics), the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease (genetics, multiomics, iPSC modelling), the Center for Disease Neurogenomics (multi-ethnic neurogenomics), and the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics (DBS, neuromodulation, computational psychiatry).
Open Science Initiatives
CommonMind Consortium (CMC)
Mount Sinai is the lead site of the CommonMind Consortium, a NIMH-funded multi-institutional project generating and openly sharing multimodal brain genomics data from postmortem brain tissue. Data types include bulk RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, and Hi-C from donors with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and ALS compared to healthy controls. All CMC data are deposited to Synapse AMP-AD and dbGaP.
PsychENCODE Consortium
Mount Sinai serves as a lead site in the NIMH-funded PsychENCODE Consortium, a 15-institution collaboration generating a comprehensive multi-omics atlas of the human brain in autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Findings were published in a coordinated set of 10 Science papers in 2018. All data are shared via Synapse AMP-AD.
ENIGMA Consortium
Mount Sinai researchers participate in ENIGMA Consortium working groups, including ENIGMA-Psychosis, contributing neuroimaging and genetics data to large-scale federated meta-analyses.
Center for Disease Neurogenomics
Large-scale multi-ethnic genomic studies using population biobanks:
- Cohorts: UK Biobank (imaging and genetics)
- BioMe (Mount Sinai’s own biobank, ~60,000 participants)
Connections
- Open data platform: Synapse AMP-AD
- Consortia: ENIGMA Consortium
Resources
- https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/friedman
- https://icahn.mssm.edu/about/departments-offices/neuroscience
- https://www.synapse.org (CommonMind and PsychENCODE data)
- https://adknowledgeportal.synapse.org (AMP-AD Knowledge Portal)

