My primary research interest is in the genetic determinants of intellectual disability (ID), formerly referred to as mental retardation (MR).  I specifically study the roles of copy number variation and somatic structural variation in the context of a “genomic mutational burden” hypothesis of ID.  This hypothesis is investigated using a combination of conventional cytogenetics methods (chromosome analysis and fluorescence in situ hybridization) and new molecular, high throughput, and high data volume, genomic technologies including single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays, gene expression microarrays, comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) arrays as well as custom targeted, whole exome, and whole genome massively parallel DNA sequencing.  We perform all our own bioinformatics and are actively engaged in the development of new analysis tools to better meet our needs and those of the scientific community.  Drosophila melanogaster and the well-established GAL4/UAS/RNAi system are used to evaluate candidate ID genes with the use of a validated olfaction learning technique (T-Maze).  Candidate genes are derived from our extensive clinical database of patients with ID that have already undergone diagnostic chromosomal microarray testing.