Dr. Andrés Román Urrestarazu
Dr. Andrés Román Urrestarazu is Gillings Fellow in Autism Research and Global Public Health at the Autism Research Center (ARC) of the University of Cambridge, UK and Assistant Professor at Maastricht University. His clinical work is based in psychiatry and public health medicine. He obtained his MD degree at the University of Santiago de Chile and his PhD degree in Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. In addition, he holds a Master's Degree in International Health Policy/ Health Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include the neuroscience of neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, mental health and social policy and the links between epidemiology and genetical and behavioral population traits. During his doctorate in the Department of Psychiatry and the Brain Mapping Unit of the University of Cambridge his work was based on the 1986 Northern Finnish Birth Cohort where he worked in early traits and endophenotypes in psychosis and ADHD.
After this he was appointed Research Officer in Health Economics and Health Policy at LSE and, with Professor Elias Mossialos, was the technical lead responsible for the first National Health Survey of Qatar. He has held positions as Director of Studies in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences (PBS) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and is a Visiting Fellow at Institut Louis Pasteur where he collaborates with Prof Thomas Bourgeron. His current research projects include Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) and STEM Prevalence in UK and USA where he is calculating if prevalence rates of ASC are linked to high systemizing regions and STEM occupations in the UK. His work is also working on an ASC Household expenditure questionnaire in China, and is the lead of the EDUCAUS consortium which is a policy mapping project across the EU’s 28 Member States. In Chile he is working on how conditional cash transfers might be used for early detection of ASC in Chile while validating the Q-Chat for early detection in South America.