The speakers:

Megan MacDonald, PhD is a professor of kinesiology, the early childhood research core director at the Hallie E. Ford Center for Children and Families and the OSU IMPACT for Life faculty scholar – all housed within the College of Health. Her vision is that every child is active and accepted.

Megan McClelland, PhD, is the Katherine E. Smith Professor of Healthy Children and Families at Oregon State University (OSU) where she serves as Endowed Director at the Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families. Her research focuses on optimizing children’s development, especially as it relates to children’s self-regulation, early learning, and school success. Her recent work has examined links between self-regulation and long-term outcomes from early childhood to adulthood, recent advances in measuring self-regulation, and intervention efforts to improve these skills in young children. She works with colleagues and collaborators around the world and is currently involved with a number of national and international projects to develop measures of self-regulation and improve school success in young children.

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Dara S. Manoach, PhD, Paul B. and Sandra M. Edgerley MGH Research Scholar 2019-2024 is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is a neuropsychologist who received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She completed a clinical psychology internship at McLean Hospital and a fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Behavioral Neurology Unit of Beth Israel Hospital. She is in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and is a Faculty Associate at the Lurie Center for Autism. She is based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging where she directs the Sleep, Cognition, and Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) Lab.

The speaker:

Hilde Geurts, Ph.D., is currently a professor in clinical neuropsychology and head of the section Brain & Cogntion at the Department of Psychology of the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Geurts studies autism and ADHD. Her starting point is the neurodiversity perspective, and she focuses on cognition (especially cognitive control/executive functioning), inter & intra individual variability, quality of life as well as interventions across the life span.

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Antonio Persico, MD, studied Psychiatry at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Rome, Italy) in 1990 and worked as Visiting Foreign Fellow at the Natl. Inst. on Drug Abuse (Baltimore, MD) between 1991 and 1994, with a focus on the genetics of drug addiction. Starting in 1995, at University “Campus Bio-Medico” (Rome, Italy), Dr. Persico began exploring the role of serotonin in neurodevelopment and the genetics of autism. Since then, autism and neurodevelopmental disorders have been his primary focus. In 2010, he started the clinical Unit of Child & Adolescent Neuropsychiatry at UCBM, then becoming in 2015 Full Professor of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry at the University of Messina (Italy). Here he directed the Interdepartmental Program “Autism 0-90” at the “G. Martino” University Hospital. Dr. Persico’s overarching target is to “link clinical phenomena to their genetic, epigenetic and neurobiological underpinnings in neurodevelopmental disorders.” His specific research interests are thus primarily translational: clustering autistic patients in biologically meaningful ways, identifying biomarkers for early diagnosis and to predict response/non-response to specific forms of therapies, developing novel evidence-based pharmacological, behavioral and occupational interventions. Dr. Persico’s goal is to “improve as much as possible the long-term trajectory and the quality of life of autistic individuals and their families at all ages.” Currently, Dr. Persico is at Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia.

The speakers:
Gray Atherton, PhD, has a BSc in Child Development from Vanderbilt University, a Master’s in Counselling from University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Individual Differences from University of Houston. She has previously lectured at University of Houston and the University of Wolverhampton. Prior to entering academia, Gray was a counselor for adolescents with neurodevelopmental conditions. “I am interested in understanding how people with autism spectrum condition see the social world. Specifically, I explore individual differences in social processing and how these differences often found in people with autism also exist in the general population. I also investigate anthropomorphism, or seeing the human in the non-human, and how this relates to social processing in autism. To investigate this, I am developing virtual reality techniques that allow for anthropomorphic experiences. My other research interest lies more broadly in embodied social processing. I am particularly interested in how movement can affect the way we see ourselves and our social partners, and how this can be used to understand special populations.”

Dr. Liam Cross “I have a BSc in Psychology from Lancaster University and a PhD in Psychology from Leeds Beckett University. My PhD focused on how and why engaging in Coordinated Rhythmic Movement affects interpersonal relations and group processes and relations. Basically how moving in coordinated ways (dancing, singing or even walking) fosters greater affiliation, cooperation & conformity towards our co-actors & changes in our social identity.” Dr. Cross’s research interests include whether the theory of mind deficits in those with ASD can be alleviated by changing the object of evaluation in these measures from human to cartoon and animal stimulus, and, most recently the overlap between tabletop games and autism.

The speaker:

Calliope Holingue, MPH, PhD is a research faculty member at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute. A psychiatric epidemiologist by training, she also has a joint academic appointment as an assistant professor from the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The speaker:

Dr. Daniel Vogt, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Human Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and Human Development. Dr. Vogt’s lab is investigating the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying autism. The lab is particularly interested in understanding how genes implicated in autism are functioning in the brain and how mutations in these genes lead to symptoms of autism and related conditions. One hypothesis is that some characteristics of autism are caused by an imbalance in neuronal excitation and inhibition. To this end, Dr. Vogt’s lab is focusing on understanding how inhibitory neurons develop and function. In addition, the lab seeks to understand how mutations discovered in autism genes alter their function.

Dr. Vogt’s research has elucidated how key developmental genes influence inhibitory neuron development. In particular, his research was important in uncovering how the gene, Lhx6, a transcription factor required for inhibitory neuron development, controls the cell fate of inhibitory neurons derived from the median ganglionic eminence (MGE) (Neuron, 2014). Dr. Vogt also developed an in vivo approach to assess the impact that human mutations discovered in autism patients have on gene function. This approach was tested with the autism candidate gene, PTEN, and demonstrated that mutations in PTEN resulted in defects in inhibitory neuron development (Cell Reports. 2015). The lab’s goal is to continue to screen mutations in genes implicated in autism to uncover both common and unique symptoms that are caused by genes. Finally, the lab seeks to combine the knowledge gained from the screening of mutations and the knowledge from studying individual genes to uncover new insights into inhibitory neuron development.