Anna Penn associate professorColumbia University A decade ago, Anna Penn received a call from a Scientific American reporter who wanted to know what to call the area of research that probes connections between the placenta and disorders of the brain. “Neuroplacentology,” Penn said, providing a word of her own invention. it has since become the […]
Konstantinos Zarbalis associate professorUniversity of California, Davis Neuroscientist Konstantinos Zarbalis had a “mostly Greek upbringing” while growing up in Germany, he says. His father, who was born in Greece, was a cantor in a Greek Orthodox church in Munich, Germany, and Kostas, as he is known, attended a Greek school until university, completing a Ph.D. […]
Kristin Sohl professor, University of Missouri Kristin Sohl learned early on how to access community resources designed to help families through tough times when she had her first child when she was 19. “I was a preschool student with no income,” she says. “My husband had just graduated from college, was just starting his masters […]
Fly View Productions / iStock Roald Øien professor, Arctic University of Norway For the past five years, Roald Øien has stress-tested the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT), a go-to-screen for autism introduced in 2001. His results are far from encouraging: the screen misses more than 70 percent of children who are later diagnosed […]
Andrew Whitehouse professor, University of Western Australia Andrew Whitehouse worked as a speech pathologist in the early 2000s and saw family after family struggle to provide good care for their autistic children, some of whom were pursuing expensive, unproven therapies. One family scrimmed to pay to have their autistic child strapped to a machine that […]
Audrey Brumback Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin Audrey Brumback wasn’t about to follow in her father’s footsteps – a doctor, scientist, and founder of the Journal of Child Neurology. She attended medical school but tried new fields – gynecology and then ophthalmology. Ultimately, however, these forays into healing were unsatisfactory compared to what […]
Fear is one of humanity’s main struggles. We all need some level of fear to survive, a healthy awareness of our surroundings and our responsibilities, but it can often get out of hand. The Insight Treatment Center is an outpatient mental health care facility for adolescents and their families struggling with mental and behavioral diseases. […]
Illustration by Laurène Boglio Hello and welcome to the community newsletter! I am your host, Chelsey B. Coombs, the engagement editor of Spectrum. Our first Twitter thread this week is from Kristen Bottema-Beutel, an associate professor at Boston College in Massachusetts. Her new study on autism looked at the interactions between autistic children and their […]
Mayada Elsabbagh Associate professor, McGill University A laboratory is a bit like a kitchen, simmering a variety of “dishes” at the same time, says Mayada Elsabbagh, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. New students may feel lost in the hustle and bustle of the activity, but Elsabbagh encourages them […]
Ethan Scott Associate professor, University of Queensland The scientists at Ethan Scott’s lab at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia, come from a dozen different countries, including North Macedonia, Tahiti and the Seychelles. Her areas of expertise are just as diverse, extending to the areas of genetics, mathematics, computer science and optical physics. Together, […]
Holly Stessman Assistant Professor, Creighton University When Holly Stessman, 35, comes home from a long day of PhD students, she has to look after a second herd: a pair of chickens of the classic British breed ‘Buff Orpington’. She got them as a day-old chick just before the pandemic started, an ecological tactic to rid […]
Ofer Yizhar professor, Weizmann Institute of Science Ofer Yizhar photographed war zones before he ever pictured a mouse brain. Today, the former Israeli Army documentary photographer is Professor of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he builds tools – such as modified proteins and neural probes – to manipulate and […]
