NEW!! Helen Tager-Flusberg awarded $10 million to establish Autism Center of Excellence!

The National Institutes of Health announced that they have awarded Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg a grant of $10 million over five years, to establish an Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) at Boston University.  The five year grant will fund several research projects specifically designed to address the question of why some individuals do not acquire spoken language skills.  Little is known about these individuals because current assessment tools and practices are not adequate for this population. More significantly, there are no models that explain why about 30% of the ASD population remains minimally verbal and no interventions that specifically and uniquely target this population in promoting spoken language. The goals of the Autism Center of Excellence is to address these issues, bringing tools, methods, and approaches drawn from others areas of speech, auditory, clinical, and computational neurosciences. The ACE, which will be located at Boston University, brings together researchers from across the university and collaborators from Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. It is hoped that this research will fill important gaps in our knowledge of ASD, lead to changes in clinical practice and interventions, and provide important biological clues about the mechanisms that underlie spoken language and social communication.

More information can be found in the following articles:

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2012/nichd-04.htm

http://www.bu.edu/today/2012/bu-to-establish-autism-center-of-excellence/

http://www.autismspeaks.org/news/news-item/nih-awards-100-million-autism-research-grants-funded-cara