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Dr. Dapretto is presently appointed as Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. She received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the UCLA Psychology Department, specializing in language development. As a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, she later acquired expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Bookheimer. Dr. Dapretto has been the recipient of several awards, including an NIH award to study the neural systems associated with language functions in typically developing children, and several grants (funded by the Cure Autism Now foundation, the M.I.N.D. Research Institute at UC Davis, the National Alliance for Autism Research, and Autism Speaks) to study the neural basis of the socio-communicative impairments observed in autism. Dr. Dapretto is currently the Principal Investigator of the imaging project titled ?Mirror Neuron and Reward Circuitry in Autism? as part of the NIH Autism Center of Excellence at UCLA. Her work has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Neuron, Brain, Nature Neuroscience, and Archives of General Psychiatry. Using several neuroimaging techniques (functional MRI, and, more recently, structural MRI and event related potentials, ERP), Dr. Dapretto?s research seeks to (i) delineate how brain maturation and the development of language and social communication co-occur in the typically developing brain, (ii) qualify the patterns of brain dysfunction in developmental disorders such as autism and childhood onset schizophrenia, (iii) examine the neural basis of linguistic and communicative functions in the adult brain since data on adults provide a normative developmental endpoint for developmental studies and can also address issues of brain plasticity, (iv) examine the role that fMRI may play as both a marker of change and a predictor of outcome following behavioral or pharmacological interventions, and (v) identify early markers of autism in high-risk infant siblings of children with an autism diagnosis.