$8.3M grant for Autism Center of Excellence links Atlanta partners
A new Autism Center of Excellence (ACE), funded by an $8.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will create a comprehensive research effort among the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the medical school’s Department of Pediatrics, and Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory.
The ACE is one of only three such centers nationwide and brings together more than 25 researchers and physicians in eight laboratories in the three Atlanta institutions, along with collaborators at Florida State University.
The ACE will study risk and resilience for autism in infants and toddlers and develop new screening programs in early infancy. The ACE also will create new community-based health care for infants and toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
The first two ACE research projects will focus on social visual engagement and social vocal engagement in ASD, building on earlier research first conducted by ACE director and Georgia Research Alliance scholar Ami Klin and collaborators Warren Jones and Gordon Ramsay, both of Emory’s Department of Pediatrics. Eye-tracking studies of social engagement and biological motion in adolescents, toddlers, and infants have already uncovered factors that are predictive of ASD in the first six months of life.
Recent work with social visual engagement compared typical infants and infants at risk for ASD. Marcus Autism Center will follow these infants from birth with new tests of social visual and vocal engagement measured through “growth charts” comparing normal social engagement and deviations in the first year of life.
Another research project, at Yerkes Research Center, will study behavior in rhesus macaques, connecting eye-tracking behavioral studies of social visual engagement and growth charts of social engagement along with genetics, behavioral, and brain imaging studies in nonhuman primates.
