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.
The CBrA Lab was thrilled to have our program coordinator, Paula Argueta, present a poster at the Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA) 2024 conference! Paula worked with co-coordinator Lucas Martin and postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Valles-Capetillo on the poster titled “The cognitive and neural correlates of reading comprehension in autistic and neurotypical children”. The poster used data from our lab’s BrainREAD study and looked at the relationship between various cognitive abilities, brain areas, and reading performance.
On Friday, February 23, Project Coordinator Lucas Martin and Graduate Researcher Meagan Beckerson attended the 2024 Alabama Autism Conference at the Bryant Conference Center at the University of Alabama. They represented the CBrA Lab at their booth, informing clinicians, researchers, caretakers, and other parties about the lab’s research and opportunities for participation. Many talented and respected speakers presented at the conference, providing insights into the current state of Autism research, care, and community. We look forward to the next AAC in 2025!
