Our Team
Leadership
Wendy Chung, MD, PhD
- Kennedy Professor of Pediatrics (in Medicine)
- PROGRESS PI Admin Core - Lead
- Genomics of Autism - Lead
Wendy Chung, MD, PhD is a clinical and molecular geneticist and the Chief of the Department of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chung directs NIH funded research programs in human genetics of pulmonary hypertension, breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, autism, birth defects including congenital diaphragmatic hernia and congenital heart disease.
Dr. Chung is a national leader in the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics. She was the recipient of the Rare Impact Award from the National Organization of Rare Disorders, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Physicians. Dr. Chung received her B.A. in biochemistry from Cornell University, her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College, and her Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University in genetics.
Jeremy M. Veenstra-VanderWeele, MD
- Suzanne Crosby Murphy Professor of Pediatric Neuropsychiatry (in Psychiatry) and Professor of Pediatrics
- PROGRESS PI Admin Core - Co-Lead
- Dissemination and Outreach Core - Lead
Dr. Veenstra-VanderVeele trained in human molecular genetics in the laboratory of Edwin H. Cook at the University of Chicago. Following his child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, he expanded his research experience with a postdoctoral research fellowship in molecular neuroscience with Randy Blakely and Jim Sutcliffe at Vanderbilt University. He is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who uses molecular and translational neuroscience research tools in the pursuit of new treatments for autism spectrum disorder and pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder. Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele’s laboratory at Columbia University and NYSPI focuses on the serotonin and glutamate systems in genetic mouse models with abnormal social or repetitive/compulsive-like behavior. His clinical/translational research program at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Center for Autism and the Developing Brain studies potential treatments for autism spectrum disorder and related genetic syndromes. His long-term goal is to be able to develop novel approaches in the molecular laboratory that can then be tested in children.
Faculty
Dima Amso, PhD
- Professor of Psychology at Columbia University
- Early Non-Invasive Markers of Infant Development - Lead
My lab is interested in understanding the process of human brain and cognitive development. The amount of learning that takes place in infancy is arguably unmatched at any other point in the human lifetime. This is even as infants are not able to walk, talk, or adroitly manipulate objects. Attention, learning, and memory systems play a critical role in these seismic shifts in neural and cognitive development. In recent years, my lab has made novel discoveries regarding the numerous sophisticated learning systems available to infants. Our plan is to exploit these discoveries to ask innovative questions about (1) how interactive attention and learning systems in infancy and childhood offer plasticity in the presence of risk and opportunity, and in doing so (2) how they are simultaneously being shaped by experience for adaptive function in future environments. Our work spans the globe, from NYC to Jordan, Ghana, South Africa, and Malawi. We are additionally committed to partnering with local and global nonprofit organizations, specifically to make the best scientific evidence part of the discussion in building effective children's programming.
William Fifer, PhD
- Professor of Medical Psychology at CUMC
Chief of the Division of Developmental Neuroscience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Fifer’s research interests involve studies of fetal and infant physiological and neurobehavioral responses to environmental challenges during sleep and the effects of prenatal exposures on later neurodevelopment. He has active collaborations with multiple departments at Columbia University and the University of South Dakota, Kings College in London and the Universities of Stellenbosch and University of Cape Town in South Africa. With funding from NIH, the Institute for Developmental Science at Columbia University Medical Center, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he and his team are involved in multiple longitudinal birth cohort studies investigating the effects of prenatal adverse exposures, sleep health, autonomic nervous system regulation and subsequent risk for neurodevelopmental disorders including sudden infant death syndrome and autism spectrum disorders.
Lauren Shuffrey, PhD
- Assistant Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Dr. Shuffrey is Principal Investigator (PI) of the RESILIENT Laboratory and Lead of Research Analytic Strategy. Dr. Shuffrey completed her PhD in 2017 at Columbia University. Her doctoral work focused on electroencephalography (EEG) and peripheral markers to examine autism spectrum disorder (ASD) subgroups and ASD intervention studies. In 2020, Dr. Shuffrey completed a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program for Translational Research in Child Psychiatric Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center focused on prenatal risk factors and neurodevelopmental disorders. In 2023, Dr. Shuffrey completed a two-year K99 training award in women’s mental health and perinatal immunology funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Dr. Shuffrey’s RESILIENT lab examines the impact of interactive prenatal maternal mental and physical health conditions on infant and early childhood brain-behavioral development.
Yufeng Shen, PhD
- Genomics of Autism - Co-Lead
- Statistical and Computational Analysis Core - Co-Lead
After completing his PhD in computational biology in 2007 at the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine, he led the analysis of the first personal genome produced by next-generation sequencing (that of Dr. James D. Watson). In 2008, he joined Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow, working in computational genomics and genetics of drug adverse reactions, and then joined the faculty in July 2011. Dr. Shen is interested in developing and applying computational methods to study human genetics and diseases.
Dennis Vitkup, PhD
His lab develops and applies state-of-the-art computational, theoretical and experimental tools to address three primary areas of interest: reconstructing biological networks, understanding the evolution of biological networks and developing efficient methods to simulate networks. Using these techniques, Vitkup’s laboratory aims to gain mechanistic insights into fundamental biological phenomena and to understand specific biological mechanisms underlying human diseases such as autism, schizophrenia and cancer, and to understand the contribution of the microbiome to human disease states.
Chaolin Zhang, PhD
- Associate Professor of Systems Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
His lab uses a combination of computational and experimental methods to study RNA regulatory networks in the nervous system. In particular, he is interested in characterizing the regulatory networks that contribute to the function during neurodevelopment and in neuronal cell types, and how these networks can be compromised in certain pathologic contexts, such as neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. His lab also works on targeting RNA regulation to develop precision genetic medicine.
Paul Appelbaum, MD
- Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, & Law
- Ethical, Social, and Legal Implications - Lead
Dr. Appelbaum’s recent research has focused on the ethical, legal and psychosocial impacts of the introduction of new technologies, such as genome sequencing, into medical research and treatment. He was previously the A.F. Zeleznik Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Appelbaum is Past President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, and has twice served as Chair of the Council on Psychiatry and Law and of the Committee on Judicial Action of the APA. Dr. Appelbaum is currently Chair of the DSM Steering Committee for APA, and serves on the Standing Committee on Ethics of the World Psychiatric Association. He has received the APA’s Adolf Meyer Award for lifetime achievement in psychiatric research, was the Fritz Redlich Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Matthew Lebowitz, PhD
- Assistant Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry)
- Ethical, Social, and Legal Implications - Co-Lead
Dr. Lebowitz is a psychologist who studies how people think about the causes of behavior and health outcomes, and how this causal thinking shapes attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. He is particularly interested in the implications of using genetics and other aspects of biology to explain why people behave the way they do or develop certain mental and physical health conditions.
Stephen Kanne, PhD
- Professor of Psychology in Clinical Psychiatry
Stephen M. Kanne is the Director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain and an Assistant Professor of Psychology in Clinical Psychiatry (interim) at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He received his bachelor’s degree and his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Washington University. He completed a clinical internship at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in Pediatric Neuropsychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Kanne’s current research interests focus on children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, targeting diagnostic tools, outcome measures, behavioral phenotyping, co-occurring symptoms, evidence-based therapies, and subthreshold symptoms. In addition to publishing in the areas of autism, Dr. Kanne has also published in the areas of cognitive neuropsychology, history of neuropsychology, and pediatric traumatic brain injury.
Rebecca Muhle, MD, PhD
- Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Dr. Muhle earned her medical and graduate degrees from the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and completed her adult psychiatry residency and child & adolescent fellowship training within the Solnit Integrated Adult and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Research Training Program at the Yale University Child Study Center. Dr. Muhle’s scientific research aims to uncover molecular genetic pathways that increase risk for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, by utilizing high-throughput genomics methods in mouse and human model systems to examine the effects of disruptions of implicated risk genes. Dr. Muhle is a board-certified general and child & adolescent psychiatrist, with a clinical focus on people who are on the autism spectrum.
Melanie Wall, PhD
- Professor of Biostatistics in Psychiatry
- Statistical and Computational Analysis Core - Lead
Dr. Wall has worked extensively with modeling complex multilevel and multimodal data on a wide array of psychosocial public health and psychiatric research questions in both clinical studies and large epidemiologic studies. She is an expert in longitudinal data analysis and latent variable modeling, including structural equation modeling focused on mediating and moderating (interaction) effects where she has made many methodological contributions.
Gazi Azad, PhD
- Assistant Professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at Mailman School of Public Health
- Dissemination and Outreach Core - Co-Lead
Dr. Azad graduated with her B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and received her Ph.D. in School Psychology from the University of California, Riverside. She completed her pre-doctoral internship at The School at Columbia University. Dr. Azad’s research focuses on using the principles of implementation science to optimize service delivery across systems of care. She is the developer of Partners in School, a multifaceted, multilevel implementation package for aligning evidence-based practices across home and school for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Additional areas of expertise include community-partnered research, mixed methods, and issues related to equity in service provision.
Kally Sparks, PhD
- Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology in Psychiatry
- Admin Core - Director of Operations
Dr. O’Reilly Sparks uses rodent models to understand typical and atypical neurodevelopment, with the idea that a single insult can alter brain-wide function at various neurobiological levels. Since earning her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008, Dr. O’Reilly Sparks has focused her studies on the systems underlying learning and memory--the hippocampal-parahippocampal network. Her work involves investigation of neuroanatomical and molecular development of the hippocampus as well as examining the structure and function of the adult hippocampus after abnormal development. These studies have implications for mental illnesses of neurodevelopmental origin, such as autism and schizophrenia. She has ongoing collaborations at the Norwegian Institute for Science and Technology and at New York University where she conducted her postdoctoral studies.
Trainees
Nicolo Pini, PhD
- Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at CUMC
Dr. Pini is a biomedical engineer by training, with extensive and consolidated expertise in advanced signal processing techniques for the analysis of physiological data (ECG, respiration, SpO2, blood pressure, and EEG). During his graduate and doctoral training, Dr. Pini designed of an innovative framework for the comprehensive, longitudinal, and rigorous characterization of the interrelationship between physiology and behavior in the perinatal period. Dr. Pini’s current research focuses on investigating novel methodologies for deriving measures of brain development and sleep health using physiological signals collected via standard clinical protocol as well as utilizing wearable devices. He has extensive expertise in analyzing multidimensional physiological signals collected in neurodivergent people including individuals who received a diagnosis of a rare genetic condition.
Celia D’Amato
- Research Assistant
Celia (she/her) joined Dr. Amso’s Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience lab at Columbia in December 2022 as a full-time research assistant. She graduated from Wesleyan University in May 2022 with a B.A. in Psychology, Hispanic Literatures & Cultures, and Science in Society. Celia is a part of Project 3 of the ACE study and helps with conducting in-person participant visits and data collection. She also does work as a video coder for the Khula LEAP study.
Yunhze (Jessica) Hu
- Research Coordinator
Jessica received her B.A. in Neuroscience and Sociology from Barnard College in 2022, where she was part of the COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcome (COMBO) study with Dr. Dani Dumitriu and developed adaptations of infant developmental assessments to be conducted remotely. She wrote her senior thesis on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on infant neurodevelopment. As part of ACE, she coordinates and conducts studies for Project 3, learning to carry out eye-tracking, EEG, and auditory tests. In addition, she assists in EEG collection for Natural History Studies of rare genetic disorders. She is also a Masters student in Sociology at Columbia University, where she carries out research pertaining to the role of rare disease organizations in scientific knowledge production.
Rebecca Seigel
- Research Assistant, Translational Neurobiology of Development Lab
Rebecca Siegel graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2022 with a BA in Neuroscience, with a cellular & molecular concentration, and a BA in English Literature. She is currently working as a Research Assistant in the TrND (Translational Neurobiology of Development) lab, helping study mouse models to understand the relationship between ASD risk factors and the associated changes in brain and behavior. On the PROGRESS team, she is the Project Coordinator for the Administrative Core and database developer. She is also the Research Assistant of Project 2, which examines the impact and experience of receiving genetic information in parents of PROGRESS cohort infants. In the future, she hopes to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.