How the Autonomic Nervous System May Govern Anxiety in Autism

About the speakers:

Dr. Manuel Casanova, made his residency training in neurology and then spent three years doing a fellowship in neuropathology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. This kindled his interest in developmental disorders of the brain. Dr. Casanova spent eight years helping to establish the Johns Hopkins Brain Resource Center and the Brain Bank Unit of the Clinical Brains Disorders Branch at the National Institutes of Mental Health. During his time at NIMH, Dr. Casanova was trained in psychiatry later joining the Medical College of Georgia as a full Professor in 1991 and then the University of Louisville in 2003 as the Kolb Endowed Chair in Psychiatry. Last June, he accepted a position as SMART State Endowed Chair in Childhood Translational Neurotherapeutics at the University of South Carolina Greenville Health System, where he is speaking to us today. His work includes studies that have looked for the presence of abnormalities of organization and lateralization in the brains of patients who exhibit language disturbances, including autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and dyslexia.

Dr. Emily Casanova is a neuroscientist who has studied autism for more than a decade and, more recently, has been studying the overlap between autism and hereditary connective tissue disorders like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. One of her current efforts concerns the study of an Ehlers-Danlos phenotype in carriers of Fragile X premutation and autonomic disorders in this population.
Emily Casanova earned her doctorate in Anatomy Science & Neurobiology from the University of Louisville’s Medical School.