Investigators
Principal Investigator
SHAFALI JESTE, M.D.
Dr. Shafali Jeste is a behavioral child neurologist specializing in autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. She is an Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Neurology in the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and a lead investigator within UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART).
Dr. Jeste’s research is focused on the use of novel electrophysiological biomarkers to better define early predictors of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to define more homogeneous, brain-based subgroups within the autism spectrum in order to inform treatment targets. She has designed innovative studies in early predictors of ASD to focus on the integration of biomarkers with behavior to define atypical development prior to the onsetof clinical symptoms. Within this framework, she has been investigating and treating infants and children with neurogenetic syndromes associated with ASD. She is the principal investigator of several studies, including early development and intervention for infants with tuberous sclerosis complex and the UCLA Autism Center of Excellence study of high-risk infant siblings. Dr. Jeste serves as the UCLA site director for a multisite National Institutes of Health Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials research study. Clinically, she evaluates and treats patients with ASD and neurological comorbidities, and directs the UCLA Developmental Neurogenetics Clinic. Dr. Jeste has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and has been the recipient of the Child Neurology Foundation’s Researcher-in-Training Award and the American Academy of Neurology’s Clinical Researcher-in- Training Award. She serves on the board of directors for the Child Neurology Foundation and was elected to serve on the board of directors for the International Society for Autism Research.
Principal Investigator
Mirella Dapretto, Ph.D.
Dr. Mirella Dapretto is currently a Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine, and a lead investigator within UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART).
Dr. Dapretto received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a specialization in Behavioral Neuroscience and then acquired extensive expertise in neuroimaging methods before joining the faculty of the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in 1999. Dr. Dapretto’s research focuses on characterizing both typical and atypical brain development. She has conducted cutting-edge work elucidating the neural correlates of core deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) including the first multimodal investigations of altered developmental trajectories in ASD relating brain function and connectivity to both behavioral phenotypes and genetic risk. Her autism research has been supported by numerous awards by private foundations as well as the National Institute of Health (NIH). Since 2007, as part of the NIH-funded Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) at UCLA, Dr. Dapretto has led the imaging projects in youth with ASD as well as in infants at ultra high-risk for autism. Her current research on autism is also supported by another large-scale NIH-funded multi-site ACE Network, focused on girls with ASD, which has recently been renewed. In addition to her work on ASD, Dr. Dapretto has long been interested in neurotypical development. As funded by NIH, some of her early work focused on characterizing the neural basis of language processing, including some pioneering studies which examined developmental changes in the neural networks subserving language learning from childhood through adulthood. ... See More
Co-Investigator
Carrie Bearden, Ph.D.
Dr. Carrie Bearden is currently a Professor in the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology and Brain Research Institute.
Dr. Bearden received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and went on to receive training in adult and pediatric neuropsychology, during her internship at the San Diego VA Medical Center and UCSD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Services. From 2001 to 2002, Dr. Bearden became a Postdoctoral Fellow under an NIMH Neuroscience Training Grant at the Childrens’ Hospital of Philadelphia, where she obtained further experience in pediatric cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Bearden joined the UCLA faculty in 2003. Dr. Bearden directs UCLA’s Staglin Music Festival Center for Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States (CAPPS), a program for youth at high risk for psychosis. Her research focuses on translational approaches to understanding disrupted brain circuitry. Her work specializes in unique genetic populations. She has received numerous awards and honors, both for her research achievements and for teaching and mentorship.
Study Coordinator
Study Coordinator
Emily Ward
Emily Ward is the study coordinator for UCLA’s Baby Brain Imaging and Behavior Study (Baby BIBS). She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Minor in Women’s Studies. As an undergraduate at UC Davis, Emily fostered an interest in autism research while volunteering at a lab as a research assistant. After graduating, Emily worked with Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes’ lab at UCSF where she engaged in research projects involving the study of behavioral and physiologic effects of parental emotion suppression on their children, and the effects of daily habits on stress and well being. She has also worked in routine mental health care for a clinic in San Francisco. Emily intends to pursue a doctoral degree in Developmental Clinical Psychology in the near future. She is interested in researching how early life experiences and environmental risk factors affect the brain-based, physiological, and behavioral underpinnings of development in children and youth.
Contact: erward@mednet.ucla.edu
Faculty and Postdoctoral Fellows
Postdoctoral Fellow
NICOLE MCDONALD, PH.D.
Dr. Nicole McDonald is a clinical psychologist with expertise in the development of infants and toddlers at risk for autism. She oversees the clinical components of the Baby BIBS study.
Dr. McDonald received her undergraduate degree at UCSD before obtaining a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Miami. During her graduate training with Dr. Daniel Messinger, her research focused on the early social-emotional development of the infant siblings of children with autism. She continued her work with infants and toddlers as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Kevin Pelphrey’s lab at the Yale Child Study Center, where she was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award through the National Institute of Mental Health. As part of this fellowship, she has conducted a longitudinal study seeking to predict individual differences in infant social development based on early brain responses to social stimuli, which were measured using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In the Jeste lab at UCLA, Dr. McDonald has been extending her training to include EEG methodology and studies of young children with genetic syndromes such as TSC. The goal of Dr. McDonald’s work is to increase our knowledge of typical and atypical social-emotional development in the first years of life in order to improve outcomes for children at increased risk for autism through earlier identification and more targeted intervention efforts.
Assistant Clinical Professor
Shulamite Green, Ph.D.
Dr. Green is an Assistant Clinical Professor in UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.
Dr. Green completed a doctorate in Clinical Psychology at UCLA in 2014, and thereafter completed a postdoctoral fellowship focused on pediatric functional neuroimaging methods at UCLA's Brain Mapping Center. Dr. Green has received multiple NIH fellowships and awards to study the neural bases of heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorders, with a focus on sensory over-responsivity. Dr. Green currently has a K08 award from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the neural bases of sensory processing issues and their effect on social functioning in children with autism and children with early life stress. Dr. Green's research integrates neuroimaging, psychophysiological, and behavioral methods to identify individual differences in risk markers and outcomes in high-risk developmental populations. Dr. Green is also a licensed clinical psychologist and works as an autism consultant with UCLA's TIES for Families program for families adopting children from foster care.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Aarti Nair, Ph.D.
Aarti Nair, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral scholar in the Dapretto Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center.
Dr. Nair received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and anthropology from the University of Mumbai. In 2015, Dr. Nair received her Ph.D. in neuropsychology from the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology in San Diego, CA. Her primary research interests lie in multimodal imaging studies of social cognition in ASD, specifically using fcMRI and DTI techniques to quantify connectivity differences within this population. Currently, she is working on studies involving maturational trajectories of subcortical networks in high-risk infant siblings, as well as studies of small-world functional network properties in the same group using graph theoretical analysis.
Graduate Students
Graduate Student
Janelle Liu
Janelle is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience in the Dapretto Lab.
Janelle earned a B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Columbia University. Her main research interests focus on using longitudinal multimodal approaches to investigate developmental changes in language networks in the infant brain. She currently uses task-based fMRI, resting state fMRI, and DTI to examine functional and structural networks underlying language acquisition in infants at high-risk for developing ASD.
Graduate Student
Tawny Tsang
Tawny is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology in the Dapretto Lab.
Her research focuses on identifying brain-based measures of ASD risk in infants at high-risk for the disorder. Prior to her graduate studies, Tawny received a B.A. in Psychology at UC Berkeley and completed a predoctoral fellowship at the Marcus Autism Center with Emory School of Medicine.
Graduate Student
Xuan Tran
Xuan is a Neuroscience MD-PhD candidate in the Jeste Lab.
She is both an Autism Speaks Weatherstone Predoctoral Fellow and an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Scholar. Xuan earned her B.S. in Neurobiology and B.S. in Chemistry from UCI in 2012. At UCI she performed research in the field of evolutionary biology under the guidance of Dr. Laurence Mueller, and in the field of post-stroke neurorehabilitation under the guidance of Dr. Steven Cramer. She joined the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) in 2013, and advanced to doctoral candidacy in 2017. View her publications here. Her interest in autism was sparked during her medical studies at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Her main interest is in characterizing neural connectivity during the first year of life in infants at risk for autism, and finding EEG predictors of clinical outcomes.