Principal Investigators

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).

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.

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.

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 Principal 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.

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.