UCLA Brain Mapping Center

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Biography

Dr. Dapretto is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Dapretto received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a specialization in Behavioral Neuroscience. She then acquired extensive expertise in neuroimaging methods as a postdoctoral fellow before joining the faculty of the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in 1999. Dr. Dapretto’s main research focus is on characterizing both typical and atypical brain development. Her work is consistently published in high-profile journals in the fields of neuroscience (e.g., Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Science Translational Medicine, Journal of Neuroscience), psychiatry (e.g., JAMA Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry), neuroimaging (e.g., Brain, Cerebral Cortex), psychology and developmental psychology (e.g., Psychological Science, Developmental Science, Child Development).

For almost 20 years, Dr. Dapretto has conducted cutting-edge work elucidating the neural correlates of core deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) including the first multimodal investigations of altered developmental trajectories in ASD relating brain function and connectivity to both behavioral phenotypes and genetic risk. Her autism research has been supported by numerous awards by private foundations as well as the National Institute of Health (NIH). Since 2007, as part of the NIH-funded Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) at UCLA, Dr. Dapretto has led the imaging projects in youth with ASD. These include an ongoing multimodal study in infants at high risk for ASD that aims to identify very early biomarkers of ASD and ultimately inform the earliest possible interventions. Her current research on autism is also supported by a large-scale NIH-funded multi-site ACE Network examining gender differences during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood in a large balanced sample of boys and girls with ASD, as well as by another NIH-funded study seeking to parse the incredible heterogeneity observed across individuals with an ASD diagnosis in order to guide more personalized and efficacious treatments.

In addition to her research on autism, Dr. Dapretto has long been interested in neurotypical development. As funded by NIH, some of her early work focused on characterizing the neural basis of language processing, including some pioneering studies that examined developmental changes in the neural networks subserving language learning from childhood through adulthood. Dr. Dapretto has also conducted many studies on the neural correlates of key issues in adolescence (e.g., social exclusion, self concept development, social media influence), including some of the very first neuroimaging studies to use a longitudinal approach and to examine the link between neural responsivity to emotional stimuli and behavioral outcome (e.g., onset of depressive symptomatology, resistance to peer pressure, risk taking, and prosocial behavior). Currently, Dr. Dapretto is involved in the NIH-funded Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, a large-scale multisite consortium on neurodevelopmental and behavioral predictors and consequences of substance abuse from late childhood through adolescence. Dr. Dapretto is also site PI on another NIH-funded multisite project – the Lifespan Human Connectome: Development (HCP-D) – a study that aims to characterize the development of functional brain networks and brain-behavior relationships from childhood to young adulthood, with particular emphasis on adolescence as a key developmental transition.

Dr. Dapretto is a dedicated mentor and educator who feels passionate about raising the next generation of neuroscientists. Her commitment is evidenced by the remarkable success of her trainees in securing prestigious pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as numerous dissertation awards. In 2018, Dr. Dapretto received the departmental Research Mentor Award in recognition of her outstanding mentoring record and dedication to her trainees. Dr. Dapretto has been affiliated with the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program for almost 20 years, serving on its Admission, Advising, and Curriculum Committees. For over a decade, Dr. Dapretto also played a key role in the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, a training program designed to forge new bridges between traditional separate disciplines (i.e., anthropology, neuroscience and psychology). Dr. Dapretto has also been a participating faculty member in the NIH-funded training programs in Advanced Neuroimaging and Neurobehavioral Genetics. Currently, together with Drs. Fuligni and Galvan, she directs another NIH-funded training program designed to train graduate students on brain and behavioral development during adolescence. At UCLA, Dr. Dapretto is also affiliated with the Brian Research Institute (BRI), the Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), the UC Consortium on the Developmental Science of Adolescence, and the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) for Translational Research in Neurodevelopment. Lastly, Dr. Dapretto is a member of the International Society for Autism Research, the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, the Society for Neuroscience, and the Flux Society.

Area(s) of Expertise

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.

Publications