In NeURoscience Perspectives with John Foxe, PhD, the director of the Del Monte Institute at the University of Rochester, picks the brains of world-renowned neuroscientists.

In this episode, Dr. Foxe sits down with David Amaral, PhD, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of California, Davis. He is also the Beneto Foundation Chair and Research Director of the MIND Institute which is dedicated to studying autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Dr. Amaral explains to Dr. Foxe what lead him to study autism, why most of his work focuses on the disorder, and how he is working to understand it on a cellular level. He also shares the statement he no longer uses in papers about autism and the role it plays in early intervention.

As Research Director, he coordinates a multidisciplinary analysis of children with autism called the Autism Phenome Project to define clinically significant sub-types of autism. More recently, Dr. Amaral has become Director of Autism BrainNet, a collaborative effort to solicit postmortem brain tissue to facilitate autism research.

In April of 2015, Amaral became Editor-in-Chief of Autism Research, the journal of the International Society for Autism Research. In 2016, he was appointed to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

A transcript version is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HOA1NincHtI