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Martha R Herbert
Assistant Professor, Neurology (Pediatric) at Harvard Medical School
Department of Neurology, MGH
MD, Columbia U Coll Physicians Surgeons
PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
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DESCRIPTION OF WORK / BIOSKETCH
Our team's work is oriented toward autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Our work is based on the presumption that autism is a multifaceted, multisystem disorder that needs to be studied in an integrative fashion across multiple levels of biological and functional hierarchies. Our model of autism is that genetic and environmental factors interact to affect multiple organ systems including the brain both primarily and secondarily. We hypothesize that in the brain, these impacts lead to altered tissue structure, chemical and signaling properties (including imbalance between inhibitory and excitatory networks) in a fashion that disrupts brain organization as well as gating, timing and connectivity. We also hypothesize that changes at these various levels interact and underlie the primary behavioral as well as comorbid features of the autism phenotype. As a brain-oriented research team, we are focusing on neuroimaging methodologies to elucidate alterations in structural and functional connectivity, and to identify and construct useful markers of abnormal development. But we are collecting this data mindful of the potentially significant role of brain-body interactions. We are thus additionally doing genotyping as well as biomarker and neurobehavioral phenotyping so that we will be able to work with a multi-leveled dataset in our analyses. Thus, our research team now has several interrelated levels of work:
1) multimodal anatomical MRI looking at tissue properties of altered brain volumes in autism and oriented toward a study of structural connectivity
2) MEG and EEG to study functional connectivity
3) Collaboration on multi-disciplinary biomarker panel
4) Collaboration at level of animal models
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