BRight
My current project, titled BRight, is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the European Commission (see also https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101198645).
BRight will investigate alternative right-hemispheric pathways for language development in autism. While language is especially left-lateralized in the typically developing brain, there is increased right-hemispheric involvement in autism. It is unclear whether these right-hemispheric neural pathways contribute to language deficits or if they form a potential compensatory network, facilitating an alternative route for successful language development. This is especially interesting to examine in the preschool age as language abilities are at their most variable and intervention strategies at their most effective.
BRight has four objectives:
1) characterize typically developing neural pathways for language in the left and right hemisphere;
2) compare individual neural pathways of autistic preschoolers to the typically developing children;
3) relate right hemisphere variables to a preschool battery of language assessments;
4) longitudinally examine preschool neural variation to school-age language abilities.
BRight will achieve this by collaborating with an existing research consortium that studied autistic preschoolers using MRI and by adding a new time point to examine these children now that they are at the school age. BRight will overcome previous limitations like an overreliance on isolated brain measures and a dependence on group-level analyses that cannot capture the heterogeneity of the autism spectrum by employing novel data fusion and normative modeling approaches. By integrating across multiple brain measures (including structural MRI, diffusion MRI and resting-state fMRI). The highly interdisciplinary approach taken in BRight will fundamentally impact our understanding of brain-behavioral correlations and the neural foundation of language in autism. The project will have significant impact on the researcher’s career as she will receive rigorous training in cutting-edge neuroimaging and statistical techniques from leading experts in the field.
Late Talker Project
During my postdoc at Vanderbilt University, I was part of the Late Talker Project, is an NIH-funded project led by prof. dr. James Booth. This ongoing project longitudinally follows up children with language delay using behavioral and MRI methods. The goal of the project is to elucidate the neural basis of language delay. I was especially involved in the behavioral work packages as well data neuroimaging aquisition and preprocessing. See for more information https://lab.vanderbilt.edu/boothlab/participate/late-talker-project/.
PIP
During my PhD, I worked on the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behaviour Project (PIP). In this project, autistic and non-autistic children were followed up over three years to track their development from preschool to school-age. The project included diverse behavioral measures, including the ADOS-2, the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS), a parent-child interaction, and neuroimaging methods, including eye-tracking, EEG and a sleep MRI. I was mostly interested in the language data from PIP and used the MSEL,VABS and the parent-child interaction to characterize standardized language, parent-reported language and natural language, respectively. One of the key conclusions of my dissertation is that multiple language modalities should be considered to gain a comprehensive understanding of autistic children’s language abilities, ideally including a natural language sample. For more information about PIP, see https://www.aims-2-trials.eu/pip/.
