Professor Shannon Weickert has made seminal contributions to the conceptualization of schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental disorder and is best known for her pioneering work on BDNF and estrogen receptor. She has also led studies that identified the birthplace of neuronal precursors in the human brain and studies that showed the postnatal recruitment of cortical inhibitory neurons is abnormal in schizophrenia. Her other work challenges long-held assumptions about human brain development including the nature of male-female differences and saliency of synaptic pruning.