Investigators Current Studies Infant & Categorization Emotion Processing Language/fMRI  Studies Sensory/Motor/Executive Deficits Diffusion Tensor Tracking Language Processing ACE Site Studies Past Fellowship Grants NAARCAN Autism Task Force Scientific Abstracts

Principal Investigators


UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Nancy Minshew

 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 Center for Excellence in Autism Research 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 upcoming NIH Autism Center of Excellence will include: 1) Dr. Mark Strauss focusing on the development of category and prototype mechanisms that organize information including face and emotion processing, formation of categories of animate and inanimate objects etc; 2) Dr. Kevin Pelphrey who will focus on gaze and motion processing mechanisms and its brain circuitry in young children and adults; and 3) Drs. Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell who will focus 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).

Mark Strauss

Mark S. Strauss, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator
 Associate Professor
Dr. Strauss received his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois. He served three years as a Lieutenant in the Navy's Medical Service Corp during the Vietnam era and has been a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh since 1978. While at Pitt, he has been both the Department's Chairperson and head of its Developmental Psychology Program.
In 1986 he co-founded the University's Office of Child Development, a center concerned with policy, intervention, and evaluation issues related to programs that serve children, youth and families. His research focuses on the early development of perceptual and cognitive abilities in infants and children. Specifically, he has been conducting studies on how children learn basic information about categories and faces during their infancy and preschool years. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of a research grant from the National Institutes of Health that is studying differences in the cognitive abilities of individuals with autism. This research studies both infants at risk for autism as well as older children and adults who have been diagnosed with the disorder. As a teaching faculty member, in 2005 Dr. Strauss received the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award, the University's highest honor for teaching, and in 2007 he was elected by students as an Honorary Faculty Member of the Golden Key International Honor Society. Finally, being concerned about the communication of research to the public, he has made numerous appearances on radio and television including the NBC Today Show. He served as a consultant for KDKA- TV's "For Kids Sake" campaign.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Marlene Behrmann 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.

Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just, PhD, Principal Investigator
D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and
Director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging
Dr. Just is a 15-year recipient of the NIMH Research Scientist Award, a 20-year Principle Investigator on Office of Naval Research grants related to spatial reasoning, computational modeling and individual differences, and grants from NIMH. He is the author of major theoretical and empirical publications on reasoning, cognitive modeling, language processing, visuo-spatial reasoning, individual differences, and neuroimaging. Dr. Just is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a founding Co-Director of a new brain imaging research facility (The Brain Imaging Research Center) that houses a state-of-the-art MRI scanner funded by the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Just’s research uses brain imaging (fMRI) in high-level cognitive tasks to study the neural basis of the architecture of cognition. The fMRI studies attempt to determine the underlying cortical components of the cognitive system and the nature of the collaboration among the components in many different types of tasks. The individual projects study high-level cognition, such as various working memory tasks in the language and spatial domains, sentence comprehension, mental rotation, imagery, object recognition, problem solving, and decision-making. The fMRI results are being used in the development of a theory of cognition based on the dynamic, collaborative activity of the relevant components, each drawing on its own set of relative specializations. This approach provides a mapping between cognitive function and brain activation.

 

Marcel Just 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.

 

Marcel Just Kevin, Principal Investigator
Assistant Professor of Psychology

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY

Diane Williams Diane Williams, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Williams was awarded a Research Career Development grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. 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 findings into clinical practice.