BIOPHYSICS, SIGNAL PROCESSING, AND STATISTICAL COMPUTING FOR A STUDY OF BRAIN ELECTRICAL RESPONSES IN AUTISM
Are you as comfortable with a frequency spectrum as with a time series? Can you program a bootstrapped distribution or an autoregressive model? Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking in MATLAB code? If you answer any of these questions with a yes, you could help us understand autism. We're working on a project that collects electroencephalographic data as children with autism and Asperger syndrome work through psychological experiments embedded in a video game. We'll be analysing these data with Independent Components Analysis, time-frequency decomposition, Granger causality, 3D modelling of brain electrical dipoles — and any other techniques that you suggest! We aim to compare both the timing and level of activity within brain regions and the degree of information transfer between brain regions, in children with autism spectrum conditions, their non-autistic brothers and sisters, and unrelated controls. These comparisons help us explore how autism runs in families, what triggers its development, and how we might eventually intervene in that development.

Prospective students should contact Matthew Belmonte <mkb4@cornell.edu> with a description of background and interests related to the project.