The CBrA Lab was very excited to be invited to tour the renewed UAB driving simulator facility. Dr. Avinash Unnikrishnan, current chair of the Department of Civil Construction, and Environmental Engineering, has been given oversight of the simulator facility, which was previously managed by the Department of Psychology. Now that it’s up and running again, we are very enthusiastic about the potential for collaborative research across departments at UAB.
We are very proud of our three researchers who presented their work at the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) meeting this February! Paula Argueta (program coordinator; left) presented her poster “Traits of depression in autistic children: the role of inhibitory control and social cognition”. McKayla Kurtz (graduate student; middle) presented her poster “The role of the executive control network in social functioning in autism”. Meagan Beckerson (graduate student; right) presented her poster “The relationship between executive functioning, brain connectivity, and externalizing behaviors in childhood”. Congrats to all three!
Graduate student Meagan Beckerson presented her project “The Role of Memory in Reading Intervention Success for Autistic Children” at the UAB College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Research Day event. Congrats on a great presentation!
We were so excited to attend the “Unlocking the Mystery of Developmental Disorders” conference last Friday (Nov 15) in Vestavia Hills, AL! Program Coordinator Lucas Martin represented the CBrA lab at our exhibitor’s booth to tell other researchers, clinicians, educators, and interested families all about the BrainREAD study.
We want to congratulate our PhD student McKayla Kurtz on her recent thesis defense! McKayla presented her project “The Role of the Executive Control Network in Social Functioning in Autism” on Oct 17 to the committee. Her thesis utilizes both neuroimaging and behavioral assessment data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). We are so proud of her hard work!
We are very proud of our undergraduate researcher Joseph Kannala and his poster presentation at the Thompson Center Autism Conference! Joseph is an undergraduate researcher from St. Louis University who collaborated with the CBrA lab over the summer on a novel research project. He used data from our lab’s MISLEAD study to assess how higher cognitive functions impact deception detection in neurodiverse young adults. Congrats Joseph!
We were delighted to have Berea College student, Lindsey Torres, complete a summer internship in the lab. She worked closely with Program Coordinator Paula Argueta and Dr. Elizabeth Valles-Capetillo conducting a meta-analysis and analyzing data from our BrainREAD study.
On Friday July 19th. Dr. Rajesh Kana and Post-Doctoral Researchers, Dr. Elizabeth Valles-Capetillo and Dr. Pinar Demirayak, attended the Alabama Advanced Imaging Consortium (AAIC) Annual Retreat. Congratulations to Elizabeth for placing 3rd in the poster presentations 
The CBrA lab director, Dr. Rajesh Kana, was invited onto the science podcast “All Around Science” to talk about autism and the brain. This latest episode was released May 20, 2024. Listen to Dr. Kana’s insights and learn about the current state of autism research here!
Link: https://allaroundscience.com/index.php/2024/05/20/the-autistic-brian-w-dr-rajesh-kana/
Congratulations to Caroline Vanderburgh for her amazing poster presentation at the National Council for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2024 meeting! Caroline’s poster examined thalamo-cortical functional connectivity in autism.
