The Autism Spectrum

Matthew Belmonte is a research scientist with the Com DEALL Trust, Bangalore, reader in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and brother and uncle to two people with autism. His research in India, England, and the United States has asked what makes the difference between family members with and without autism, and also what underlies their many similarities. Belmonte helped establish the theory of abnormal brain connectivity in autism, has related prerequisite skills such as attentional and sensorimotor control to the emergence of social communication, and currently leads a project applying motor skills training to support development of communicative skills. His broader interests concern how interactions within and between brain networks covary with autistic cognitive traits, psychological distance and level of construal, sex and gender, and culture; and how these individual and cultural differences may point the way to patient-centred therapeutic strategies.After reading computer science and English literature as an undergraduate at Cornell University and postgraduate study in neuroscience at the University of California San Diego, Belmonte completed an MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, a PhD in behavioural neuroscience at Boston University, and postdoctoral study at the University of Cambridge. He has served as adjunct lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assistant professor at Cornell University, and visiting professor at the National Brain Research Centre (India), as well as on the editorial board of Autism Research and currently on the editorial board of Molecular Autism. He is a founding member of the International Society for Autism Research. Evdokia Anagnostou is a child neurologist, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto and senior Clinician Scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair in translational therapeutics in ASD and the Dr Stewart D Sims Chair in autism, and is elected to the board of the International Society for Autism Research. Dr Anagnostou has published widely. Her broad and integrative areas of research include neuroimaging, genetics, clinical trials, and studies of lived experience across neurodevelopmental conditions.Dr Anagnostou trained in neurology/child neurology at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada and then completed a research fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where she remained for her first academic appointment and served as clinical director of Seaver Research Centre. She then moved to the University of Toronto / Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital where she is co-director of the Autism Research Center and Assistant Director of the Bloorview Research Institute, in addition to seeing patients with developmental differences and complex needs. Dr Anagnostou is an associate editor of Molecular Autism and Autism Research

• 1. Introduction and Overview2. History, ideology, and the therapeutic alliance3. Etiologies: molecular, neural, psychodynamic4. Clinical features, subtypes, and targets for therapy5. Screening, assessment, and diagnosis6. Interventions and therapies7. Autism across the lifespan