In 2024, three grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality supported faculty members in their research career development.
Alexandra Bey, MD, PhD; Matthew Engelhard, MD, PhD; and Danai Fannin, PhD, CCC-SLP, are leveraging the NIH-funded Duke Autism Center of Excellence grant to conduct their own related research studies.
Alexandra Bey, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine
Electrophysiological Biomarkers of Social Engagement in Autism
In concert with the Duke Autism Center of Excellence COMET study, Dr. Bey’s research measures brain activity via electro-encephalogram while a child watches videos and plays games in an app designed by Duke researchers to measure child behavior. Dr. Bey will be tracking brain activity over time as the child reaches behavioral milestones to learn how these milestones are reflected in brain activity changes. A grant from the National Institute of Mental Health is supporting her with training in new research skills under the mentorship of Duke Center for Autism faculty. Dr. Bey, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, hopes to identify ways of measuring brain activity that can be implemented in future clinical trials for new intervention methods to assess their impact over time.
Primary Mentor: Geraldine Dawson, PhD
Co-mentors: David Carlson, PhD; Kimberly Carpenter, PhD; Lauren Franz, MB, ChB, MPH; Benjamin Goldstein, PhD; Sara Jane Webb, PhD
Matthew Engelhard, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke University School of Medicine
Employing Machine Learning to Reveal Signs of Autism in Electronic Health Records
A grant from the National Institute of Mental Health is giving Dr. Engelhard the opportunity to analyze electronic health care records for patterns of interaction with the health care system that are associated with autism. With promising findings already published, Dr. Engelhard, a health data scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence, hopes to develop unique statistical methods of analyzing electronic healthcare records with machine learning that can be integrated with screening results from caregiver surveys to improve the accuracy of early autism detection.
Primary Mentor: Geraldine Dawson, PhD
Co-Mentors: Lauren Franz, MB, ChB, MPH; Benjamin Goldstein, PhD; David Page, PhD
Danai Fannin, PhD, CCC-SLP
Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, North Carolina Central University
Adjunct Associate Professor of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences, Duke University
Member, Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development Community Engagement Advisory Board
Acceptability, Feasibility, and Appropriateness of Digital Autism Screening, Clinical Decision Support, and Research Engagement for Black Children
Dr. Fannin’s research focuses on the acceptability of early identification tools for Black autistic children, improving retention of Black families in long-term autism studies, and examining the cultural responsivity of resources and personnel in the health system. An award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will support her five-year research development path and study. In the long term, Dr. Fannin, a speech and language therapist, aims to find strategies that can be incorporated into research and public policy that reduce disparities in health outcomes for autistic individuals by race and gender.
Primary Mentor: Lauren Franz, MB, ChB, MPH
Co-Mentors: Geraldine Dawson, PhD; Deepak Kumar, PhD; Lionel Howard, EdD; Scott N. Compton, PhD; Jennifer Gierisch, PhD; K. Sean Kimbro, PhD