The Autistic Brain: Neurobiology and Social Behavior

Speakers

Fred R. Volkmar, MD

Yale University
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Fred Volkmar is director of the Child Study Center and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at Yale University School of Medicine. He also serves as chief of child psychiatry at Children's Hospital at Yale–New Haven.

Volkmar is a child psychiatrist who trained at Stanford University and at Yale. He has a long standing interest in the assessment and classification of autism and related disorders. He was the coordinator of the International Field Trial for autism and related disorders, which developed the definition of autism used in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, Fourth Edition, 1994). He is also an associate editor of Psychoses and Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence and, along with Drs. Paul, Klin, and Cohen, of the Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Third Edition.

Mirella Dapretto, PhD

David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
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Mirella Dapretto is a developmental neuroscientist presently appointed as associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. She received a PhD in developmental psychology from the UCLA Psychology Department, specializing in language development. As a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, she then acquired expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) under the guidance of Susan Bookheimer.

Dapretto has been the recipient of several awards, including an NIH award to study the neural systems associated with language functions in typically developing children, and three grants (funded by the Cure Autism Now foundation, the M.I.N.D. Research Institute at UC Davis, and the National Alliance for Autism Research) to study the neural basis of the persistent communicative impairments observed in autism. Dapretto currently is co-investigator with Susan Bookheimer on the CPEA imaging study at UCLA entitled "Functional Imaging of Social Communication in Autism."

Michael E. Goldberg, MD

Columbia University
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Michael E. Goldberg is the David Mahoney Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Neurology, and Psychiatry. He received his AB and MD degrees from Harvard University, and did a residence in neurology at the Harvard Longwood Program in Neurology. As a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH, in Robert Wurtz's laboratory, he discovered the first evidence for attentional modulation of visual responses in the awake, behaving monkey. He was a senior investigator at the National Eye Institute from 1975 to 2001, and moved to Columbia in 2001, where he directs the Mahoney Center for Brain and Behavior Research. He is an active member of the Neurology Department, overseeing a resident clinic and serving as an attending neurologist. His research has concentrated on the physiological mechanisms underlying the generation of eye movements, and the role of the cerebral cortex in attention and spatial perception.

He has received numerous awards, including NIH grants to study attention and spatial perception, the Heller Lectureship in Computational Neuroscience of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel; the Wundt Lectureship at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany; and the Sprague Lectureship in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. He is past treasurer of the Society for Neuroscience, and he was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Moderator

Gerald Fischbach, MD

The Simons Foundation
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Gerald D. Fischbach is the scientific director of the Simons Foundation. Fischbach was formerly dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences at Columbia University, and was director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the N.I.H. from 1998–2001. Fischbach received his MD in 1965 from Cornell University Medical School and interned at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle. He began his research career at the National Institutes of Health, serving from 1966–1973. He subsequently served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, first as associate professor of pharmacology from 1973–1978 and then as professor until 1981. From 1981–1990, Fischbach was the Edison Professor of Neurobiology and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine. In 1990, he returned to Harvard Medical School where he was the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chairman of the Neurobiology Departments of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital until 1998.

Fischbach is a past-president of the Society of Neuroscience and serves on several medical and scientific advisory boards. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine, and he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a non-resident Fellow of the Salk Institute. Throughout his career, Fischbach has studied the formation and maintenance of synapses, the contacts between nerve cells and their targets through which information is transferred in the nervous system. He pioneered the use of nerve cell cultures to study the electrophysiology, morphology, and biochemistry of developing nerve–muscle and inter-neuronal synapses. His current research is focused on roles that neurotrophic factors play in determination of neural precursor fate, synapse formation, and neuronal survival.

Catherine Zandonella

Catherine Zandonellais a science writer based in New York City, covering such topics as environmental science, public health, and applied technology. She has a master's degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. Zandonella has written for a number of publications, including New Scientist, The Scientist, and Nature.