Research

Dr. Gholson Lyon is the most active researcher associated with Ogden Syndrome. He completed his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, where he studied biochemistry and molecular biology. He received an M.Phil. in genetics from the University of Cambridge, England and a Ph.D. in pharmacology and peptide chemistry at Rockefeller University. He received his M.D. from Weill Cornell Medical College, followed by adult psychiatry training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/New York Presbyterian Hospital – Columbia. Dr. Lyon subsequently undertook child and adolescent residency at the NYU Child Study Center, Bellevue and Rockland Children’s Psychiatric Center. Dr. Lyon started his independent research career in 2009, after finishing clinical residencies in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry, first at the University of Utah, then Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and most recently as a principal investigator at the Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities (IBR) in Staten Island, New York. He is also a Professor (adjunct) at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to his research on the genetics of neuropsychiatric illnesses, Gholson is focusing on the genetic basis of rare Mendelian diseases and the development of treatment strategies for some of these conditions. He and his collaborators first published about Ogden syndrome in 2011, after the family had been living for many years in Ogden, Utah, with five boys that ultimately died from the illness. Since that time, he has been working to discover many dozens of other children and adults (males and females) with mutations in the same gene, NAA10.