Director’s message; August 2020

Dear Friends,

We sincerely hope that you and your loved ones have escaped the ravages of COVID-19. It is at times like these that we appreciate that friends and family are the most important things in life. Yet this crisis is often hard to deal with — particularly if your family includes an individual with a developmental condition. The COVID-19 pandemic is also affecting autism research worldwide; you can read about the impact on and resiliency of autism scientists in an article that was recently published in the journal Autism Research.

The work of Autism BrainNet continues to move forward. We recently co-sponsored, with the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), a virtual Special Interest Group meeting on the Use of Postmortem Brain Tissue for Autism Research, which was well attended. Two of our node directors, Cyndi Schumann and Matthew Anderson, gave summaries of their work and we had a number of junior autism scientists provide brief highlights of their research.

Coming soon: We are getting increasingly excited about the launch of our new website that will take place this fall. The new website will have the same www address but a totally new look that we hope will make the user experience more pleasant and productive. We look forward to your reaction to the changes.

As always, we appreciate your support of Autism BrainNet and wish you a healthy and happy remainder of the summer.

David G. Amaral, Ph.D.
Scientific Director, Autism BrainNet