Home / News /
Phenomes, Connectomes, and Genomes: Autism Research as a Data-Driven Science
Presented by: John Darrell Van Horn, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology and Data Science at the University of Virginia
Date: March 7, 2024
Time: 11am – 12pm (PST)
Registration: https://rb.gy/vaj1yx (requires UW NetID)
Location: IHDD Auditorium at the Haring Center (Room 150)
Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99093399844
Phenomes, Connectomes, and Genomes: Autism Research as a Data-Driven Science – Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a widely heterogeneous syndrome whose etiology remains poorly understood. Interestingly, however, boys are diagnosed with ASD nearly five-times more frequently than girls. The origins of this distinction have formed the basis of research under our NIMH-funded Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) Network project – now in its third wave of data collection. A joint effort involving researchers from U. Virginia, UCLA, Children’s National Hospital, Yale, and, formerly, UW, this effort gathers deep phenotyping involving a rich battery of neuropsychological assessments, full-genome sequencing, and multi-modal MRI neuroimaging. In this presentation, I will summarize these efforts, focusing on our examination of phenotypic dimensions, brain connectomic variations, and potential genomic loci which differentiate ASD boys and girls from their typically developing counterparts. I will then provide a summary of the activities – data collection and analytic – that are planned as our project moves further ahead into its second decade of collaborative research.
Speaker: John Darrell Van Horn, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Data Science at the University of Virginia. Having held prior faculty positions at Dartmouth, UCLA, USC, he has over thirty years of experience in human brain imaging in healthy brain as well as in clinical and developmental syndromes. He published extensively on brain form, function, and connectivity and has specialized in neuroscientific data processing methods and workflow design. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuroinformatics, has a career-long record of undergraduate and graduate student teaching, and is the director of the NIH-funded Biomedical Data Science Innovation Lab (BDSIL) project. He is a Fellow of the OHBM and contribute to the research best practices and educational committees of several major research organizations. A native of the Great Pacific Northwest, he currently lives in Keswick, Virginia.
March 13, 2024 Update: Video from the event, Jack Van Horn: Phenomes, Connectomes, and Genomes:Autism Research as a Data-Driven Science.
