SPEAKERS
Prof Simon Baron –Cohen
Prof Peter Mundy
Prof Francesca Happe
Dr. Eric Fombonne
Dr Varun Warrier
Dr Rosa Hoekstra
Dr Mayada Elsabbagh
Prof. David G. Amaral
Dr. Catherine Lord
Dr. Hernán Amartino
Prof Bhismadev
Chakrabarti
Dr Guilliame Dumas
Prof Heidi Feldman
Dr. Roberto Toro
Dra. Lauren Franz
Dr. Gonzalo I. Cancino
Dra. Carla Mazefsky
Tanya L Procyshyn
Dr. Chawarska
Jay McClelland
Prof Simon Baron –Cohen
Simon Baron-Cohen is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. He is author of Mindblindness, The Essential Difference, Prenatal Testosterone in Mind, and Zero Degrees of Empathy. He has edited scholarly anthologies including Understanding Other Minds. He has written books for parents and teachers including Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts. He is author of the DVDs Mind Reading and The Transporters, to help children with autism learn emotion recognition, both nominated for BAFTA awards.
He formulated the ‘mindblindness’ theory of autism (1985), the ‘prenatal sex steroid’ theory of autism (1997), and the ‘empathizing-systemizing’ theory of typical sex differences. He has made contributions to many aspects of autism research, to typical cognitive sex differences, and synaesthesia research.
He created the first UK clinic for adults with suspected Asperger Syndrome (1999) that has helped over 1,000 patients to have their disability recognized. He gave a keynote address to the United Nations in New York on Autism Awareness Day 2017 on the topic of Autism and Human Rights.
He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the American Psychological Association. He is Vice-President of the National Autistic Society, and President of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). He was Chair of the NICE Guideline Development Group for Autism (Adults) and was Chair of the Psychology Section of the British Academy. He is co-editor in chief of the journal Molecular Autism and is a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator. He is the Principal Investigator of the Wellcome Trust funded award investigating the genetics of autism, in collaboration with the Sanger Centre.
He serves as Scientific Advisor, Trustee or Patron to several autism charities including the Autism Research Trust, and to the company Auticon, which only employs autistic people. He has taken part in many television documentaries, including the BBC’s Horizon, and Employable Me. See www.autismresearchcentre.com
Prof Peter Mundy
Peter Mundy, Ph.D. is a developmental and clinical psychologist who has been working on defining the nature of autism for the past 30 years. His efforts in that regard began in 1981 at the UCLA where his work with collaborator Marian Sigman contributed to the understanding that joint attention impairments area fundamental feature of the social deficits of preschool children with autism. Between 1991 and 2007 he was the founding director of the University of Miami/Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (UM/NSU CARD) which serves over 4000 children and families. He is currently is the Lisa Capps Professor of Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Education at the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and School of Education. He is also the Director of Educational Research at the M.I.N.D. Institute. In the last ten years Dr. Mundy has been engaged in a program of research designed to advance the understanding and treatment of problems in learning, social and emotional development in school-aged children with autism. In 2006 he began a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supported program of research devoted to understanding neuro-cognitive, motivational and social processes that affect individual differences in the expression and outcomes of autism in school-aged children. In 2009 he was awarded NIMH funding to enable his research group to develop a multidisciplinary virtual reality laboratory for research on the role of social-attention in the social-learning disabilities of school- aged children with autism. In 2012 Dr. Mundy and his research group were awarded an Institute for Education Sciences grant to provide a much needed large scale study of academic development in elementary and secondary students with autism. Dr. Mundy has published over 120 scientific papers on child development, autism and related disabilities.
Prof Francesca Happe
Francesca Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London. She completed her undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University and her PhD at UCL/MRC Cognitive Development Unit, supervised by Professor Uta Frith. Her research focuses on autism spectrum conditions. She has explored the nature of social understanding in typical development and 'mind-reading' difficulties in autism. She is also actively engaged in studies of abilities and assets in people with autism, and their relation to detail-focused cognitive style. As well as cognitive methods, her research has involved functional imaging studies, exploration of acquired brain lesions, and behaviour genetic analysis. Most recently she has begun studies of under-researched groups including ageing in autism, women with autism, agenesis of the corpus callosum, and children with extreme demand avoidance. She is the author of more than 180 research papers and a book on autism for general readers. She has received the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal, the Experimental Psychology Society Prize, and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award, and was President of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) from 2013-2015.
Dr Varun Warrier
Varun is a postdoctoral researcher working on the genetics of autism and related traits. His work is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. and the Autism Research Trust. His PhD was funded by scholarships from St John's College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Trust. Prior to his PhD he completed an MPhil at the ARC, Cambridge, funded by St John's College Bursary, and the Nehru Trust. He has primarily worked on genome-wide association studies of empathy, systemizing, and cognitive empathy. He works closely with Dr Matt Hurles, Professor Thomas Bourgeron, Illumina Inc, and 23andMe Inc.
Dr Rosa Hoekstra
Dr Rosa Hoekstra is a lecturer at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience. After finishing her PhD in Behaviour Genetics at the VU University in Amsterdam, she continued her research through a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre. Since 2009 she combines her autism research with teaching in the field of Psychology, first at The Open University (2009-2015) and now at King's College London (2015-present).
Her research interests broadly cover two themes:
i) Furthering the understanding of the heterogeneity of autism, by developing and validating quantitative instruments to assess the variable expression of the autism phenotype and its cognitive characteristics, and exploring the genetic and environmental factors influencing autistic traits using twin and family study designs.
ii) Global perspectives on autism with a specific focus on Africa. In collaboration with colleagues at Addis Ababa University she leads a range of autism studies in Ethiopia, exploring sociocultural factors on autism in Ethiopia, and evaluating the effectiveness of mental health training on increasing autism awareness and general mental health awareness among rural community health workers in Ethiopia.
Dr Mayada Elsabbagh
Mayada Elsabbagh, PhD is Assistant Professor in Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University. She holds appointments as a Research Scientist at the McGill University Health Center and the Douglas University Mental Health Institute where her program is integrated with routine care.
Her research focuses on understanding the root causes of autism and tracing its developmental pathways. The approach combines innovative research with the mission of accelerating translation of scientific discoveries into community impact.
Mayada’s contributions include the discovery of very early brain function markers for autism prior to the onset of behavioural signs. She has supported the successful launch of several collaborative research and translational networks, aimed at accelerating the pace of discovery in autism. This includes the Transforming Autism Care Consortium (TACC), a Quebec research network supported by FRQ-S and several community partners.
She is also active in global efforts to improve evidence-based practice in the community and capacity building in low- and middle-income countries. The public value and social relevance of Mayada’s research has been recognized through various awards including the Neville Butler Memorial Prize British Psychological Society Neil O’Conner Prize.
Dr. Hernán Amartino
Medical Doctor graduated at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, specialized in Pediatric Neurology. Dr.Amartino was trained in the field of inborn errors of metabolism at the Laboratorio de Neuroquimica by Prof. Nestor Chamoles. Curently he heads the Child Neurology Department and also the MPS Clinic at Hospital Universitario Austral, in Buenos Aires.
He is Associated Professor of Pediatrics at Austral University and Director of Postgraduate courses in Inborn errors of metabolism (IEM) and Lysosomal disorders (LSDs). Dr Amartino is currently Principal Investigator in clinical trials for rare diseases, specially LSDs. He is author of over 50 publications including books, book chapters and peer review journal articles. He is also member of many international advisory boards related to LSDs. His main interest are neurodegenerative disorders, new treatments for leukodystrophies and LSDs and the neurocognitive and developmental aspects of patients with IEM.
Professor Bhismadev Chakrabarti
Bhismadev Chakrabarti is Professor of Neuroscience and Mental Health and Research Director of the Centre for Autism at the University of Reading. After a first degree in Chemistry, he studied Neurobiology, and did his PhD with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. He received the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and has won multiple grants from the Medical Research Council UK. In 2015, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology. The fundamental arm of his research focuses on studying empathy and reward processes in autism. His research uses multiple techniques that measure behaviour, autonomic, and neural activity (eye-tracking, psychophysics, facial EMG, EEG, and fMRI). In a parallel, applied arm of research, his lab has been working in India to build an autism research toolkit, through validating widely used screening and diagnostic tools, as well as cognitive measures linked to autism, and using these to conduct the first systematic study of autism prevalence in Indian schoolchildren. He currently leads a consortium that aims to develop a tablet-based platform to detect early autism risk in India.
Dr Guillaume Dumas
Guillaume Dumas is a researcher in the department of neuroscience of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Originally from engineering and theoretical physics, he did a Ph.D. on cognitive neuroscience at the University of Paris 6 (UPMC) and then moved in a postdoc at the Center for Complex System and Brain Science of Florida Atlantic University. He came back to France for working in the “Human Genetics and Cognitive Functions” unit of the Institut Pasteur, where he started as a postdoc before receiving his permanent position. He then created the platform SoNeTAA (Social Neuroscience for Therapeutic Approaches of Autism) at the child and adolescent psychiatric department of the Robert Debré hospital in Paris. His interdisciplinary research is focused on integrative accounts of neural, behavioural and social coordination dynamics. Methods used range from both intra- and inter-individual neuroimaging techniques to neurocomputational simulations. He is also a science writer and journalist and is engaged with multiple projects at the cross-road of Art and Science. He has, for instance, co-founded HackYourPhD, a community advocating internationally the use of openness in Science and Knowledge as a common good, and ALIUS, an international and interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the investigation of the diversity of consciousness.
Prof Heidi M Feldman
Heidi M Feldman MD PhD is the Ballinger-Swindells Professor of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics at Stanford. She earned a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of PA and then an MD at the University of CA San Diego. After residency at UCSD, she completed fellowship training at Children’s Hospital Boston. Her research has focused on language and reading in children with conditions that put development at risk, including deafness, persistent ear infections, and prematurity. Her book “Redesigning Health Care for Children with Disabilities: Strengthening Inclusion, Contribution and Health,” argues for new priorities in health care for children with disabilities. She has held several leadership positions, including president of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
Dr. Roberto Toro
Roberto Toro is leader of the group of applied and theoretical neuroanatomy at the unit of human genetics and cognitive function of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. After a degree in engineering at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile, he obtained a Master and a PhD in cognitive science and neuroscience at the University of Paris 6, France. Roberto Toro is interested in the development and evolution of the brain. His team develops mathematical models to better understand the origin of neocortical organisation, in particular, biophysical models of brain folding and connectivity. They also study the ferret brain as an animal model for the development of a complex mammalian brain. This line of research relies on multiple brain imaging modalities at different scales, such as whole-brain histology and magnetic resonance imaging. The results obtained through the theoretical and experimental analysis of brain development are used to study brain evolution, in particular, the evolution of the primate neocortex. The study of evolution and development provide a conceptual framework for better understanding the variability of the human brain, allowing us to disentangling normal and pathological variation, in particular, within autism spectrum disorder. The study of neuroanatomical diversity relies on massive datasets with clinical, behavioural and cognitive data, whole-genome genotyping, and magnetic resonance imaging data for tens of thousands of individuals.
Prof. David G. Amaral
After spending the early part of his career at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Dr. Amaral joined the University of California, Davis in 1995 as a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Neuroscience and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. In 1998, Dr. Amaral was named the Beneto Foundation Chair and founding Research Director of the MIND Institute which is dedicated to studying autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Dr. Amaral received a joint PhD in Psychology and Neurobiology from the University of Rochester and then carried out postdoctoral work at Washington University in neuroanatomy. Dr. Amaral initially pursued basic research dealing with the neurobiology of social behavior and with the development, neuroanatomical organization and plasticity of the primate and human amygdala and hippocampal formation. For the last 20 years, his research effort has increasingly been dedicated to understanding the biological bases of autism spectrum disorder. This work has included postmortem studies of the autistic brain and magnetic resonance imaging studies of children with autism spectrum disorder. He has also spearheaded efforts to establish nonhuman primate models of autism spectrum disorder. He coordinates a comprehensive and multidisciplinary analysis of children with autism at the M.I.ND. Institute called the Autism Phenome Project to define biomedical characteristics of different types of autism. In 2001, Amaral collaborated with Cure Autism Now and NAAR to hold the first International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego which led to INSAR and the INSAR conference. More recently, Dr. Amaral has become Director of Autism BrainNet, a collaborative effort sponsored by the Simons Foundation to solicit postmortem brain tissue to facilitate autism research. Amaral was the President of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) in 2009 and 2010. In April of 2015, Amaral became Editor-in-Chief of Autism Research, the journal of INSAR. In 2016, he was appointed to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In 2017, he successfully competed for an NIH Autism Center of Excellence, which he directs. This ACE is dedicated to providing innovative and targeted treatments to children with autism. Amaral has published over 300 research articles and has co-edited three books.
Dr. Catherine Lord
Dr. Catherine Lord is the George Tarjan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is a practicing clinical psychologist whose primary focus is autism and related disorders across the lifespan from toddlers through adulthood. Her research and clinical work have involved the development of diagnostic instruments that describe individual profiles of skills and weaknesses and carrying out longitudinal studies from age 15 months up to 26 years with the goal of identifying protective and risk factors that influence milestones of progress over the years. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Eric Fombonne trained in child and adolescent psychiatry in France. He held appointments as clinical scientist at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM, France), as Senior Lecturer and Reader at the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital, King’s College London, UK (1993-2001), as tenured Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University (Canada), Head of the Division of Child Psychiatry and Canada Research Chair in Child Psychiatry (2001-2012). In September 2012, he joined the Department of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon (USA), and is now Director of Autism Research at the Institute for Developmental Disabilities. He has a long experience of clinical work with children with autism and their families, over the lifespan, and has been also directing clinical services for teenagers with depression. His research activities on developmental disorders and child and adolescent psychiatric disorders encompass clinical/longitudinal and population-based epidemiological studies, clinical trials, and genetic studies. He has published over 320 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 40 chapters in books. He is past Associate Editor of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JADD; 1994-2004); he is currently Joint Editor of Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP) and is on the editorial board of several other journals in the field of autism and child psychiatry.
Complete publication list
Professional URL:
http://www.ohsu.edu/people/eric-j-fombonne/8F1F0E53EE3C4F9CB1B2A236F0290BAD
Dr. Eric Fombonne
Dr. Lauren Franz
Lauren Franz is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health at Duke University. She holds an appointment as an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Cape Town, where she is a member of the Center for Autism Research in Africa. Dr Franz focuses her research on improving access to evidence-based early intervention for neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in low-resource settings. She is particularly interested in using implementation science to inform the integration of evidence-based practice into diverse, global settings, by placing local stakeholder perspectives and the local context at the center of her work. If we want the benefits of early detection and early intervention for ASD to be globally attainable and inclusive of culturally and linguistically diverse families, understanding the implementation context is an essential step. Dr Franz has several ongoing research studies in the fields of neurodevelopmental disorders and child and adolescent mental health that are being conducted with colleagues in the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Duke Global Health Institute.
Dr. Gonzalo I. Cancino
Dr. Gonzalo I. Cancino holds degrees in Biological Sciences and a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile under the direction of Dr. Alejandra Alvarez, where he won the award for excellence for the best PhD thesis in 2009. He subsequently completed his postdoctoral degree at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of Drs. David Kaplan and Freda Miller, funded by scholarships from the Becas Chile Scholarships program and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. During his postdoctoral research he studied how the transcription factors of the p53 tumor suppressor protein family participates in embryonic and adult neurogenesis, and the formation of the cerebral cortex. Subsequently, he studied how mutations in the gene associated with autism ANKRD11 regulated the formation of the cerebral cortex. Since 2017, Dr. Cancino has been the principal investigator of the Center for Integrative Biology and Assistant Professor of the Universidad Mayor. Funded by projects of the International Brain Research Organization and the FONDECYT Regular program, he is interested in understanding how various genetic and environmental factors alter the normal development of neural stem cells during the development of the nervous system. His work is focused on animal models of genes associated with autism, as mutations in these genes regulate the fate of neural stem cells, altering the normal development of the cerebral cortex and causing cognitive and behavioral problems
Dr. Carla Mazefsky
Dr. Carla Mazefsky is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Autism Research (CeFAR) and the Director of the Regulation of Emotion in ASD Adults, Children, & Teens (REAACT) Research Program. She is a past recipient of the INSAR Ritvo-Slifka Award for Innovation in Autism Research. Her current studies take a lifespan approach, with an emphasis on the transition to adulthood. Her program of research focuses primarily on emotion regulation and associated mental health and behavioral concerns in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including the mechanisms underlying emotion dysregulation in ASD and the development of new assessment and treatment approaches. She is co-editor of the soon-to-be published Oxford Handbook of Autism and Co-Occurring Psychiatric Conditions, author of the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory, and co-author of the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) Program. She is currently running a multisite randomized controlled clinical trial of EASE for verbal 12- to 21-year-olds with ASD, developing a version of EASE for youth and adults with ASD and co-occurring intellectual disability, and oversees the Autism Inpatient Collection study on the ASD specialty inpatient unit at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital that is focused on more severely affected youth with ASD and aggression. She is beginning new measure development initiatives, which are focused on developing and validating a change-sensitive measure of core autism symptoms in children and a measure of adult functional outcomes for adults with autism and other developmental disabilities.
Dr. Chawarska
Dr. Chawarska is the Emily Frasier Beede Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Statistics and Data Science. She has received her clinical and research training at Yale. She is a leading expert in research on identifying early prognostic markers and novel treatment targets in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Her recent work is focused on improving understanding of attentional and affective processes involved in development of core and comorbid features in ASD as well as on investigation into the links between development of brain connectivity during prenatal and early neonatal periods and later outcomes in infants at risk for ASD. She leads the NIH Autism Center of Excellence and the Social and Affective Neuroscience of Autism Laboratory at the Yale Child Study Center.
Tanya L Procyshyn
Tanya L Procyshyn is a doctoral scientist at the University of Cambridge whose work explores the roles of hormones in human social behaviour. She is currently working on the oxytocin inhalation project at the Autism Research Centre, using neuroimaging methods to explore how intranasal oxytocin influences brain activity in women with and without autism during socially-relevant tasks. She is also interested in how oxytocin may interact with other hormones that are expected to exert their own effects on social cognition, such as androgens and estrogens. Tanya's PhD is funded by the Cambridge Trust, the Autism Research Trust, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Prior to coming to Cambridge, Tanya completed an MSc in Biological Sciences with Prof Bernard Crespi at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Adopting an evolutionary perspective, this research explored how variation in salivary hormone levels and hormone-associated genes (e.g., OXTR, AVPR1a) contributes to individual differences in social traits such as empathy.
Jay McClelland received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 and is well known in the field of connectionism. He served on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, before moving to Carnegie Mellon in 1984, where he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He was a founding Co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2006 McClelland moved to the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, where he served as department chair from fall 2009 through summer 2012. He is currently the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, and the founding Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation at Stanford.
Over his career, McClelland has contributed to both the experimental and theoretical literatures in a number of areas, most notably in the application of connectionist/parallel distributed processing models to problems in perception, cognitive development, language learning, and the neurobiology of memory. He was a co-founder with David E. Rumelhart of the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) research group, and together with Rumelhart he led the effort leading to the publication in 1986 of the two-volume book, Parallel Distributed Processing, in which the parallel distributed processing framework was laid out and applied to a wide range of topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. McClelland and Rumelhart jointly received the 1993 Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 1996 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2001 Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology, and the 2002 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award for this work.
McClelland has served as Senior Editor of Cognitive Science, as President of the Cognitive Science Society, as a member of the National Advisory Mental Health Council, and as President of the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has received the APS William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to the basic science of psychology, the David E. Rumelhart prize for contributions to the theoretical foundations of Cognitive Science, the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, and the Heineken Prize in Cognitive Science.
McClelland currently teaches on the PDP approach to cognition and its neural basis in the Psychology Department and in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford and conducts research on learning, memory, conceptual development, decision making, and mathematical cognition.
Jay McClelland
