Student Profiles

Madeline is an MD/PhD student and hopes to ultimately contribute to the greater understanding of and personalized treatment for complex heterogeneous neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. 

Growing up, Madeline worked extensively with children with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. She was impressed by their resilience in overcoming challenges and was fascinated by the ways in which they processed the world differently, especially social environments. This inspired her to pursue autism research while at the College of William and Mary, where she joined a neuroscience lab that studied autism under supervision of Drs. Cheryl Dickter and Joshua Burk. Here, she used EEG to investigate the spectrum of autistic traits in neurotypical individuals and learned how this could help scientists gain a greater understanding of the heterogeneity in people with autism.

Excited by the prospects of using neuroimaging to study in vivo brain phenotypes and behavior, after college Madeline joined the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health under Dr. Karen Berman. Here, in addition to expanding her neuroimaging knowledge to include MRI, PET, and MEG, she also was first exposed to genetics research in a rare genetic, neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome. 

Madeline became excited by the opportunity to study Williams syndrome and other rare genetic disorders that may contribute to our understanding of more common neuropsychiatric disorders. This inspired her to continue working with Dr. Berman as a PhD student. In collaboration with Drs. Ed Bullmore and Petra Vertes at The University of Cambridge, Madeline hopes to conduct multimodal neuroimaging, genetic, and computational research to investigate how genetics and neural development impact brain structure and function, ultimately contributing to disease etiology. She hopes to create new discoveries about the gene-brain-behavior link and how to better develop personalized treatments for individuals with neuropsychiatric disorders.