Visiting a pediatrician’s office, parents often see growth charts that mark physical milestones to show how their baby is developing. But there is no such chart for brain development. Jed Elison, assistant professor of child development, hopes to change that.
Elison’s research is making leaps in characterizing brain-growth trajectories in children between 3 and 24 months, an age when the foundation is laid for subsequent social and cognitive development.
“This is a time of dynamic change but also of vulnerability for maladaptive behavioral patterns,” says Elison. “Understanding this development period in greater detail may ultimately allow us to improve the health and well-being of children.”
Elison got word this summer that he won a grant of $2.45 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health to study brain and behavioral development during this critical period of development. The grant is called BRAINS—Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists—and Elison will use it to apply breakthroughs in neuroscience to understand the rapid and complex development of babies’ brains.
Scientists have long been studying neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s diseases in attempts to identify early signs that predict whether an individual will eventually develop those disorders. Elison wants to apply similar ideas to early infancy to see if it’s possible to identify patterns of brain development that may predict future risks for children. He hopes to create a chart that will diagram growth trajectories for specific brain regions, circuits, and networks and then link these patterns of brain development to patterns of behavioral development.
“The award allows me to ask ‘risky’ questions that most people at my career stage would shy away from,” he says.
Elison will use technologies developed through the Human Connectome Project, an effort to map the neural pathways in the adult human brain spearheaded by researchers at the University of Minnesota and Washington University in St. Louis. His grant has allowed him to assemble an exceptional team combining expertise from the U’s Institute of Child Development, Department of Psychiatry, and Center for Magnetic Resonance Research.
Identifying normal characteristics of brain development will allow Elison’s team to see whether a child’s brain development is abnormal before behavioral signs and symptoms emerge. In the future, it could allow doctors to intervene earlier and could lay a foundation for the prevention of disorders and mental illnesses later in life.
Appreciating complexity
Elison has always had a desire to understand the complexity of the human condition. Studying babies, he says, has helped him gain an understanding of how that complexity emerges over time.
As an undergraduate, he became interested in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain thought to underlie uniquely human cognitive function, like one’s ability to reason about events that could take place in the future. Elison, an Idaho native, was studying at the University of Utah when a mentor pointed him to a body of research that suggested the prefrontal cortex may not be working optimally in children with neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Elison pursued this interest in his undergraduate honors thesis while also working as a research assistant for the Utah Autism Research Program.
“After working with children with autism and their families, my intellectual interest in the condition transformed into a personal interest,” says Elison. “I wanted to help.”
That experience led him to studying babies. During graduate studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Elison studied infant cognition and behavior, as well as the early identification of autism in at-risk infants. To broaden his expertise after completing his doctorate, he spent two years at the California Institute of Technology for postdoctoral training. There he studied social neuroscience, trying to understand babies’ amygdala function, a part of the brain that processes emotion and supports learning.
It was in California that Elison learned of an open position in Minnesota.
“I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work here,” says Elison. “The Institute of Child Development has produced some of the best research and best researchers in the field of child development, and I wanted to be part of this exceptional tradition.”
Upon arrival, Elison was immediately impressed by the institute’s interdisciplinary approach to research. At ICD, he has been able to marry his interests in infant development and brain development.
“It’s an ideal environment for a developmental psychologist working across traditional disciplines,” he says.
Over the past year, Elison has established a lab that features aspects of neuroscience, computer science, biostatistics, and clinical, cognitive, and social psychology, all integrated toward the understanding of how a child’s mind works and how the brain develops.
The BRAINS grant is awarded to exceptional scientists in the early stages of their careers who plan to make a long-term commitment to research that is a priority to the National Institute of Mental Health. It is propelling Elison forward as he works to develop prevention for maladaptive behavioral development.
“It’s a great achievement for me personally, but I think it speaks to the quality of environments where I trained and the exceptional environment at ICD that I currently call home,” he says.
Elison is already helping to create that type of environment for the next generation of students. The opportunities afforded by an interdisciplinary research program, he believes, give students the opportunity to get diverse, hands-on experience applicable to a variety of future occupational contexts.
Learn more about Jed Elison, the Institute of Child Development, and ELAB—the Elison Lab for Developmental Brain and Behavior Research.
Story by Ali Lacey | October 2014
Share this story:
