This issue of the SFARI newsletter includes: (1) SFARI 2020 Research awardees, (2) SFARI’s response to appeals for racial justice in science and society, (3) SPARK update: New phenotypic data now available, (4) SFARI Gene: New data release, (5) Requesting SFARI data and biospecimens during COVID-19 pandemic, (6) SFARI abstracts and e-posters at INSAR 2020 Virtual, (7) SFARI Investigator and board member elected to the National Academy of Sciences, (8) SFARI Investigators and board member elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, (9) Workshop report: SFARI workshop explores challenges and opportunities of gene therapies for autism spectrum disorder, (10) Highlights of SFARI-funded research, (11) Past webinar: Allyson Berent, “From parent advocate to nonprofit chief science officer, to biotherapeutic company cofounder — A personal journey through drug development for Angelman syndrome.”
SFARI is developing several new initiatives to promote inclusion of underrepresented minorities in autism research and the larger scientific community.
SFARI gathered together some 250 current and prospective autism researchers for a social on November 17 at the Society for Neuroscience’s 2014 annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
Today, we’re announcing our annual request for applications (RFA) for SFARI Pilot and Research Awards. Letters of intent (LOIs), the short statements that precede full applications, are due no later than 9 October, 2015. As we do every year, we’ve updated this column to provide a better picture of how the SFARI science team makes decisions on research proposals.
Simon E. Fisher is director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and professor of language and genetics at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also an honorary research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) in Oxford, UK.
Fisher obtained his natural sciences degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, followed by a D.Phil. at the Genetics Unit of the Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford. For his postdoctoral research, he joined Professor Anthony Monaco’s group at WTCHG in Oxford and worked on identifying genetic factors that contribute to developmental disorders such as dyslexia and speech and language impairments. During this time, he and his colleagues identified FOXP2, the first case of a gene mutated in speech and language impairment.
In 2002, Fisher was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship and became head of his own laboratory at the WTCHG, where he used state-of-the-art methods to uncover how language-related genes influence the brain. From 2007 to 2010, Fisher was also the Isobel Laing Fellow in Biomedical Sciences at Oriel College, Oxford, where he taught biochemistry and medical genetics. In 2010, he was appointed director of a new department specifically devoted to language and genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Fisher is author of over 75 journal articles, including peer-reviewed research in Nature, Nature Genetics, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Current Biology and American Journal of Human Genetics, and review articles in Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Annual Review of Neuroscience, Trends in Genetics and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He has an h-index of 41. Fisher is frequently invited to talk at leading international conferences across a diverse range of fields and has also spoken to school, student and public audiences on a number of occasions. His research has a strong interdisciplinary remit, integrating data from genetics and genomics, psychology, neuroscience, developmental biology and evolutionary anthropology. Fisher is an elected fellow of the Society of Biology, and his awards include the Francis Crick Prize Lecture in 2008 and the inaugural Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize in 2009.
SFARI’s deputy scientific director, John Spiro, outlines two important changes that have been implemented in light of SFARI’s support for preprints of life science research findings. SFARI Investigators are encouraged to post preprints on recognized servers ahead of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, the SFARI biosketch form has been updated to include space for grant applicants to list manuscripts deposited in preprint servers. SFARI hopes that these changes will help to accelerate the pace of autism research.
Mani Ramaswami is the professor of neurogenetics at Trinity College Dublin. Ramaswami’s laboratory was among the first to combine cell biology and genetics to analyze synaptic mechanisms in Drosophila. His current work is focused on neuronal functions of RNA-granules and RNA-binding proteins in vivo and neural circuit mechanisms involved in behavioral habituation. Based on his laboratory's studies of olfactory habituation in Drosophila, Ramaswami recently proposed that habituation may be generally mediated by inhibitory representations or negative images of excitatory stimulus ensembles created by a specific form of excitation-inhibition balancing that is altered in autism spectrum disorders.
Ramaswami has an M.S. degree in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi; a Ph.D. from the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology; and was a Human Frontiers Science Program and Life Science Research Fellowship supported postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. He has held tenured academic positions in National Centre for Biological Sciences, in Bangalore (a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), and at the University of Arizona. He is a past McKnight Neuroscience Scholar and the recipient of two National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Awards. He is a Science Foundation Ireland Investigator, a reviewing editor for eLife, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, an adjunct professor in the National Centre for Biological Sciences and the University of Arizona, as well as current director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience.
Two SFARI Investigators were elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and one SFARI Investigator was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April 2022.
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