Annual Visiting Scholars in Autism Research & Clinical Service Delivery Speaker Series

About the event

Sponsored by the College of Medicine and Dr. Bruce and Maxine Johnson Medical Sciences Research Endowment

Presented by: David Amaral, PhD, Distinguished Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences Beneto Foundation Chair, Director of Research, MIND Institute Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis

Topic: Autism Research: What We Know and What We Don’t

The presentation will heavily be based on findings from the UC Davis MIND Institute Autism Phenome Project. This is a longitudinal study of children with autism and age matched nonautistic children. Children enter the study soon after diagnosis (2-3 ½ years of age) and undergo behavioral and cognitive assessment as well as magnetic resonance imaging, EEG and other biological tests. The families return periodically and the oldest participants are now 14-18 years old. I will review questions where we have substantial evidence towards an answer: When does autism start? Does autism change throughout life? I will also raise some issues where evidence is not yet clear: What are the causes of autism? What is the best animal model for autism? I will conclude with a short discussion over the use of language to describe autistics and characteristics of autism.

About the speaker

David Amaral, PhD, received his undergraduate education at Northwestern University and graduated with a degree in Psychology. He attended the University of Rochester where he received a joint PhD in Neuroscience and Psychology. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University. He then moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla where he remained for 13 years. During this period, he was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego. Dr. Amaral joined the University of California, Davis in 1995 as a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Neuroscience. He is also a core scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. Dr. Amaral was the Beneto Foundation Chair and founding Research Director of the MIND Institute from 1998 to 2018. Dr. Amaral started the Autism Phenome Project in 2006 with the collaboration of numerous MIND Institute faculty and staff, and the project has become the largest, single-site, longitudinal analysis of young autistic children. Dr. Amaral is the Director of the UC Davis Autism Center of Excellence. In 2015, he became Editor-in-Chief of Autism Research, the journal of INSAR. He also serves as Director of Autism BrainNet, a program funded by the Simons Foundation to develop a postmortem brain repository to enhance autism research. He has published more than 350 research articles that have been cited over 80,000 times. He has co-edited three books. In 2019, Amaral was elected to the prestigious US National Academy of Medicine.