Doctors and Staff
TRANSCEND key personnel, who span multiple disciplines, are united by a commitment to addressing the biological features of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). By pursuing multiple dimensions of measurement in a coordinated fashion, and by drawing upon biological as well as psychological clinical observation in formulating hypotheses, we believe that we will be able to
- Uncover core abnormalities
- Identify subgroups
- Identify features that can be affected by treatment
- Expand options and improve quality of life for individuals with NDDs
MARTHA HERBERT, Ph.D., M.D. (DIRECTOR; MRI AND BIOMARKERS)
Dr. Martha Herbert, is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard
Medical School, a Pediatric Neurologist with subspecialty certification
in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities at the Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston, a Principal Investigator and a member of the MGH Center for
Morphometric Analysis, and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT-MGH Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging. She earned her medical degree at
the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She
trained in pediatrics at Cornell University Medical Center and in neurology
and child neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she
has remained. Prior to her medical training she obtained a doctoral
degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying evolution
and development of learning processes in biology and culture in the History
of Consciousness program, and then did postdoctoral work in the philosophy
and history of science. This work has influenced her current orientation
toward systems biology, brain connectivity and brain-body interrelationships. In
2004 she received the first Cure Autism Now Innovator Award; she directs
the Cure Autism Now Foundation's Brain Development Initiative. She
is the Co-Chair of the Environmental Health Advisory Board of the Autism
Society of America. Her research program includes studying what
makes some autistic brains unusually large, how the parts of the brain
are connected and coordinated with each other, and how we can develop
measure sensitive to changes in brain and body function that could result
from treatment interventions.
TAL KENET, Ph.D. (MEG)
Dr. Tal Kenet is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and a Principal
Investigator in the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurology.
She is also affiliated with the Harvard-MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical
Imaging at MGH-Charlestown. Dr. Kenet obtained her HMS/MGH faculty appointment
in September 2005, following her post doctoral training with Dr. Michael
Merzenich at UCSF. She has extensive training and knowledge in systems
neuroscience, with particular expertise in sensory processing. Dr. Kenet’s
PhD work has become seminal in the field, as she was the first to show,
using electrophysiological techniques, that the visual cortex rehearses
functionally significant patterns in the absence of external inputs.
During her post doctoral training, Dr. Kenet extended her expertise on
sensory processing by studying the auditory cortex, and in particular
the processes that may lead to abnormal development of auditory cortex
in the rat model. Subsequently she became interested in autism and in
the merits of MEG, and successfully applied for a Young Investigator
Award from the Cure Autism Now foundation and from the MIND institute
at UC Davis. These awards enabled her to pursue a study of auditory processing
in children with autism at the MEG lab at UCSF, where she has successfully
used the technique in over 20 children with autism and 20 age matched
controls (ages 7-12). Since moving to MGH she has used MEG successfully
with both visual and auditory stimulation on several children and adults,
both with and without autism. Dr. Kenet also has extensive experience
with designing and implementing experimental protocols focusing primarily
on sensory processing.
KATHERINE MARTIEN, M.D. (EEG)
Dr. Katherine Martien is a Principal Investigator and a Neurodevelopmental
Pediatrician with subspecialty certification in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
with the LADDERS (Learning and Developmental Disabilities Evaluation
and Rehabilitation Services) Clinic, an outpatient clinic of the Massachusetts
General Hospital located in Wellesley. Educated at Mount Holyoke
College and the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr.
Martien did her internship and residency at Boston Children’s Hospital. After
practicing primary care pediatrics at the M.I.T. Health Service for 10
years, she spent the next five years at The Hospital for Sick Children
in Toronto where she did further fellowship training in Developmental
Pediatrics, Neurology and Epilepsy and began clinical research on autism
and on the relationship between autism and epilepsy.
JEROME KAGAN Ph.D. (EEG)
Dr. Jerome Kagan is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
His research has addressed the maturation of cognitive competences, temperamental
factors in personality development, and moral development. He is a member
of the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and has been honored as making a distinguished contribution to science
by the American Psychological Association and The Society for Research
in Child Development. He is the author of 12 books and over 250 empirical
papers.
NANCY SNIDMAN, Ph.D. (EEG)
Dr. Nancy Snidman is a Developmental Psychophysiologist. Her research
in biological correlates of temperament has included several longitudinal
studies involving hundreds of children spanning the last three decades.
In addition, she has studied several clinical populations including, children
with depression, anxiety, burn trauma and autism. She has also been the
director of research for The Infant Study at Harvard and an adjunct faculty
member in psychology at Harvard. She has worked closely with Dr.
Jerome Kagan for several decades.
MATTHEW ANDERSON, M.D., Ph.D. (TRANSLATIONAL PROGRAM)
Dr. Matthew P. Anderson is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical
School, a Principal Investigator and Associate Neuropathologist at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a Visiting Scientist in the Department
of Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
is a former Neuroscience Fellow of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa, Nobel Laureate,
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences. He received his degrees at Cornell University and
the University of Iowa, and his medical specialty training was obtained
at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts
General Hospital, and Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA. He
is board certified in Neuropathology and Anatomic Pathology. Dr.
Anderson is a past recipient of an Independent Scientists Award from
the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Strokes, a Career
Development Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health, a Burroughs
Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Howard Hughes
Medical Institute Research Fellowship for Physicians Award, and the International
Distinguished Dissertation Award, Council of Graduate Schools.
MATTHEW BEMONTE, Ph.D. (EEG, MRI and INFORMATICS)
Dr. Matthew Belmonte is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Human Development at Cornell University. His work for the past
decade and a half has addressed autism using techniques of quantitative
EEG and fMRI, and has cut across subdisciplines and ideologies in the
neuroscience of autism. His education and experience are wide-ranging
and integrative: his postgraduate training took place in the laboratories
of Eric Courchesne at UCSD, focusing on EEG, MRI morphometric and behavioural
studies of attention in autism, and Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at McLean Hospital,
focusing on cognitive fMRI studies. His postdoctoral work took place
with Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge, combining his past experience in
low-level studies of attention and perception with a new focus on methods
of investigating high-level social cognition. Initially educated
as a computer scientist, Dr. Belmonte spent two years programming visual
neuroscience experiments at the New York University Center for Neural
Science and a year on computational psychoacoustics in private industry,
and developed nonparametric statistical methods for fMRI and EEG data
analysis in time and frequency domains. Much of Dr. Bemonte’s
attention has been devoted to combining expertise and unifying subdisciplines. He
has authored several collaborative papers on abnormal neural connectivity
as a biological theme around which to unify disparate psychological theories,
physiological results, and genetic findings, and on how to overcome technical
and social obstacles to data sharing. Dr. Belmonte is the brother
and uncle of two people with autism, and has served on the Scientific
Review Council of Cure Autism Now.
PHILIP GRIEVE, Ph.D. (EEG AND MEG COHERENCE)
Dr. Philip Grieve is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
and Pediatrics in the Division of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics
at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr.
Grieve's laboratory pursues studies of infant brain development through
measurements of brain electrical activity with the electroencephalogram
(EEG). The laboratory has two portable 128 lead EEG recording machines
that are used in bedside studies. Dr. Grieve's focus is the perinatal
period and utilizes recordings from fetal primates, premature and full
term infants, and young children. With custom data processing,
he is able to deduce the brain's functional connectivity and relate its
alterations to medical risk factors for adverse outcome. Dr. Grieve has
over 8 publications in this area of research.
ROSALIND PICARD, PhD (Miniaturized autonomic nervous system monitoring
equipment; affective computing)
Dr. Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective
Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things
That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization
at the lab. Prior to completing her doctorate at MIT, she was a Member
of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she designed
VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developed new methods of image
compression and analysis. She was honored as a Fellow of the IEEE in 2005. The
author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional
signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning,
and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering
research in affective computing and, prior to that, for pioneering research
in content-based image and video retrieval. She is recipient (with Tom
Minka) of a best paper prize for work on machine learning with multiple
models (1998) and is recipient (with Barry Kort and Rob Reilly) of a "best
theory paper" prize for their work on affect in human learning (2001).
Her award-winning book, Affective
Computing, (MIT Press, 1997) lays the groundwork for giving machines
the skills of emotional intelligence. She and her students have designed
and developed a variety of new sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing,
recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information,
with applications in human and machine learning, health, and human-computer
interaction.
MATTHEW GOODWIN, ABD. (intensive monitoring study design and data
analysis methodologies)
Matthew Goodwin has over a decade of experience working with individuals
with ASD, their teachers, and parents at the Groden Center, a non-profit
educational and treatment center for persons with autism spectrum disorders
and other developmental disabilities located in Providence, Rhode Island. He
has an exemplary track record successfully gathering physiological data
via controlled experiments with both adults and children on the autism
spectrum.His doctoral dissertation includes a discussion of the iportnatce
of intensive multidisciplinary characte4rization of individuals on the
autism spectru, and explicates the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic
research methodologies and rationales. He and the Groden Center have developed
an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Rosalind Picard at the MIT Media Lab,
since their autism and psychology research methodology expertise complements
the technology expertise of the MIT ML, and will help the combined team
to shape the technologies in ways that truly make a significant difference
for advancing understanding of affective and stress related components
of autism, and hopefully lead to better basic scientific understanding
as well as practical interventions.
STAFF
Annette Robichaud, MSW M.Ed., senior research coordinator, comes to the TRANSCEND team with many years of expererience in senior administration, grants management, budget, and human resources, as well as training in education and experience with autistic children.
Nandita Shetty, MS, is a magnetic resonance neuroimaging engineer with academic and corporate experience in scanning, sequence optimization and imaging analysis. Ms. Shetty coordinates the implementation of multimodal imaging acquisition and analysis.
Suzanne Maness, MS, is a school psychologist experienced in the assessment of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. She also has a background in autism research.
Emily Mott, BA, is a trained ABA (applied behavioral analysis) therapist with several years of experience working with severely impaired autistic children, Ms. Mott is instrumental in working with young subjects to insure cooperation during data acquisition and also assists with recruiting efforts.
Avi Ringer, BA, is pursuing a public health career with emphasis on the increased rates of contemporary environmentally modulated diseases, and is contributing research assistance to building the TRANSCEND biomarkers program.
Alyssa Orinstein, BA, is in charge of subject recruitment and scheduling.
Niki Mirabella, BA, is a an EEG technologist.