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Principal Investigators
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Nancy Minshew, MD,
ACE - Program Director
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology and Child Neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Minshew is the director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Minshew has developed a program of research focused on autism as a distributed neocortical systems disorder that disturbs complex information processing and results in a broad constellation of cognitive and neurologic impairments. The NIH Autism Center of Excellence includes: 1) Dr. Mark Strauss focusing on the development of category and prototype mechanisms that organize information including face and emotion processing and formation of categories of animate and inanimate objects; 2) Dr. Kevin Pelphrey focusing on gaze and motion processing mechanisms and brain circuitry in young children and adults; and 3) Drs. Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell focusing on neural systems connectivity and machine learning analysis of fMRI signals, to determine how the brain analyzes activity to classify words. Other projects associated with the center involve diffusion tensor tracking (Dr. Tom Conturo) and a longitudinal study of language, motor and cognition in infant siblings (Dr. Jana Iverson). |
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Mark S. Strauss, PhD,
Co-Principal Investigator |
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Carla Mazefsky, PhD Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Mazefsky is a licensed child clinical psychologist specializing in autism. Dr. Mazefsky’s clinical experience includes being the first intern to pass the Developmental Disabilities rotation at Brown University with distinction based on her treatment and assessment of autism and conducting well over 500 evaluations of children with autism spectrum disorders. Dr. Mazefsky provides clinical oversight for the diagnostic characterization process at ACE by reviewing feedback reports and ensuring that the staff maintains reliable administration of tests. Dr. Mazefsky's research focuses on clarifying factors related to emotional reactions in older children and adolescents with high-functioning autism or Asperger's disorder. More specifically, her research considers multiple potential contributors to the complexity of emotional functioning in autism, including individual behavioral and cognitive characteristics, co-occurring psychiatric disorders, family history factors, and underlying brain differences. |
CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
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Marlene Behrmann, PhD - Principal Investigator
Professor in the Department of Psychology Dr. Behrmann also has appointments in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh) and in the departments of Neuroscience and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. and M.A. at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, in Speech and Language Pathology, and a PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto. Her research is on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie the ability to recognize visual scenes and objects (common objects, faces and words), represent them internally in visual imagery, and interact with them through eye movements, reaching and grasping, and navigation. The major research approach is the study of individuals who have impairment in visual perception, including individuals who have had a stroke or selective trauma, and individuals who are autistic. This behavioral/neuropsychological approach is combined with several other methodologies, including measuring accuracy and response time in normal subjects, simulating visual processes and their breakdown following brain-damage using artificial neural networks; and examining the biological substrate using functional neuroimaging to evaluate patterns of cortical activity. She has published her research in many journals and books and has written extensively about her research findings and their theoretical implications. |
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Marcel Adam Just, PhD,
Principal Investigator
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Tom Mitchell, Co-Principal
Investigator
Fredkin Professor of AI and Learning Director, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery School of Computer Science Dr. Mitchell works on new learning algorithms, such as methods for learning from labeled and unlabeled data. Much of his research is driven by applications of machine learning such as understanding natural language text, and analyzing fMRI brain image data to model human cognition. |
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Kevin
Pelphrey, PhD, Principal Investigator
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology Dr. Pelphrey received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the 2008 Boyd McCandless Award in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association and is a John Merck Scholar. Dr. Pelphrey¹s research program addresses questions at the intersection of developmental psychology and social and cognitive neuroscience, by combining the use of (fMRI) functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye tracking, and genetics. His studies within the ACE Project II investigate the neural basis of social cognition, such as gaze and emotion processing, biological motion, emotional regulation, action understanding, and reward circuitry throughout development in children and adults with and without autism. |
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Diane Williams, PhD,
Program Co-Director Assistant Professor-Department of Speech-Language Pathology Dr. Williams holds a doctorate in speech-language pathology and has extensive clinical experience with individuals with autism and two years of post-doctoral research training. She is conducting behavioral and fMRI studies of language processing in individuals with autism in collaboration with Dr. Minshew and Dr. Marcel Just. Dr. Williams completed a post-doctoral fellowship in autism with Dr. Minshew after obtaining her doctorate in speech-language pathology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She has more than 20 years of clinical experience with individuals with autism giving her a unique ability to translate research. |
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