Matthew W. State MD, PhD, is a child psychiatrist and human geneticist studying pediatric neuropsychiatric syndromes. His lab focuses on gene discovery as a launching point for efforts to illuminate the biology of these conditions and to develop novel and more effective therapies.

Dr. State received his undergraduate and medical degrees at Stanford University, completed his residency in psychiatry and fellowship in child psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and earned a PhD in genetics from Yale University working in the lab of David C Ward. He was on the faculty at Yale from 2001 to 2013 where he was the Donald J. Cohen Professor of Child Psychiatry, Psychiatry and Genetics and the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Yale Program on Neurogenetics. He is currently the Oberndorf Family Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at UCSF and Director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute and Hospital.

Dr. State’s lab has played a leading role in demonstrating the contribution of rare and de novo variation to autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Tourette disorder (TD), and brain malformation syndromes. Recent work has contributed to the identification of dozens of ASD risk genes, the identification of the first high confidence TD genes, and has utilized systems biological approaches to characterize the spatial and temporal convergence of autism genes in developing human brain. Dr. State plays a leadership role in a number of national and international collaborative genomics studies of autism and Tourette disorder, including the Simons Simplex Collection Genomics Consortium, the Autism Sequencing Consortium, and the Tourette International Collaboration (TIC) on Genetics.