Postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Susan Bookheimer and Mirella Dappretto.

Working on the relationship between genotypes and functional phenotypes in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and developmental biomarkers in babies at risk of developing ASD.

Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine
Thesis: Neural Networks and Genetics of Colored Sequence Synesthesia

Punchline

SYNESTHETES

Left Hemisphere 

CONTROLS

Right Hemisphere

How to read these graphs:

Each sphere represents one brain region and is placed in anatomical space.  Blue signifies no significant difference between controls and colored-sequence synesthetes.  Green signifies a significant difference in the way these brain regions cluster together. Clustering in this model describes how nodes fall into modules together, or how they organize into neighborhoods with one another.

Conclusion:

While listening to grapheme-rich clips of Sesame Street, colored-sequence synesthetes (who associate color with numbers and letters) cluster visual regions together while controls cluster frontal and parietal regions.  In particular, synesthetes cluster grapheme and color regions more than controls, supporting the suggestion that synesthetes experience color in response to achromatic numbers and letters (graphemes). Tomson et al., In Press.