Spotlights
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spotlightIn the fall of 1980, when he left his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, for undergraduate studies at Cornell University in upstate New York, John Constantino was determined to pursue one of two careers: a doctor or a school teacher.
“If I didn’t make it in med school, I figured being a...→
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spotlightIn the late 1960s, as an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, Cathy Lord spent a couple of hours a day teaching two young boys with autism.
She was working for clinical psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas, one of a few doctors who believed in behavioral therapy for...→
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spotlightAt first glance, the waiting room at the Ministry of Health Hospital in Muscat, Oman, may look different than that of your average American hospital.
Men dressed all in white and women in black burqas wait in separate rooms, even if they are members of the same family. But talking to these...→
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spotlightSitting on a sofa in his office at the Yale Child Study Center, Ami Klin plays a movie clip on a tiny laptop.
The clip stars a younger Klin, with larger glasses but the same easy smile, vying for the attention of a young girl with autism. His face inches from hers,...→
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spotlightIn 1982, Josh Huang was an impressionable young biology undergraduate at Shanghai’s FuDan University. Like some of his fellow Chinese students, he knew he wanted to be a neuroscientist, but with limited access to scientific journals, had no idea which big questions were then at the forefront of research.
That September, a...→
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spotlightIn May 2002, on an isolated hilltop in Delphi, overlooking the Aegean Sea, several dozen scientists convened to discuss how the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, develops.
It was there, at the site of the legendary Greek oracle, that Gordon Fishell reached a turning point in his career.
Fishell, then 42, had...→
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spotlightStylianos Antonarakis still vividly remembers the thorny statistical problem that had vexed him for several months in 1982. Antonarakis, then a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, had turned to his colleagues at Hopkins, but none of them had been able to solve the problem.
On a colleague’s recommendation, Antonarakis eventually contacted...→
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