Kelly Botteron is a professor of psychiatry (child) and radiology at Washington University School of Medicine. She is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist and a recognized expert in pediatric and infant neuroimaging with special expertise in multisite pediatric imaging investigations.
One goal of Botteron’s research is to further our understanding of the structural development of specific neural circuits across a range of psychiatric disorders and typical healthy development. Her laboratory uses structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to characterize these developmental changes in relation to behavioral, cognitive, environmental and genetic influences on neural circuit development. Her team has fully developed imaging protocols to optimize high-quality data acquisition from unsedated infants, toddlers, children and adolescents (imaging more than 500 infants and children). Recent studies in her lab have also included resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI).
Botteron has had continuous National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding over the past 23 years. Over the past 11 years, she has also been involved with the Autism Centers for Excellence (ACE) Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) multisite study to characterize very early brain development with MRI in infants at risk for developing autism. Additionally, Botteron has been heavily involved with the NIH-funded MRI Study of Normal Brain Development Project over the past 18 years, where she was the lead investigator directing the Clinical Coordinating Center for this six-site study.
