Ami Klin, PhD
Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center

Mentee:

Alexander Westphal, MD

Dr. Klin directs the Autism Program at the Yale Child Study Center, which is one of the National Institutes of Health Autism Centers of Excellence and was awarded $7.5 million of direct funding by the NIH in 2007. This program includes a broad range of diagnostic and treatment services, and an interdisciplinary program of research that includes behavioral, brain, and genetics investigations. Dr. Klin's primary research activities focus on the social mind and the social brain, and on aspects of autism from infancy through adulthood. These studies include novel techniques such as eye-tracking laboratories, which allow researchers to see the world through the eyes of individuals with autism. These techniques are now being applied in the screening of babies at risk for autism in the Simons Laboratory of Social Neuroscience in Infancy. Together with Fred Volkmar, MD, Dr. Klin is part of a global research consortium from 19 countries that identified an individual gene and a region of a chromosome that may lead to autism in children.