Dr. Alarcón is currently a Co-Principal Investigator of the Speech and Language Loci project in CART and an Assistant Professor-in-Residence in the UCLA Department of Neurology. She is also a research fellow in the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. Dr. Alarcón specializes in genetic analysis of quantitative traits that characterize childhood development. Her research has focused on the genetic etiology of language performance and cognitive abilities in healthy twin children and adolescents as well as those with developmental language delays. In the CART Project II, she is responsible for quantitative linkage and association studies of autism endophenotypes from children with autism spectrum disorders. She received her Bachelors degree in psychobiology from Scripps College, Claremont in 1992, and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1997, where she specialized in behavioral genetics. She conducted her research on the heritability of reading and math disabilities, and cognitive abilities in twins and adoptees at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. She then completed two postdoctoral fellowships – the first, in medical genetics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and the second in neurogenetics at UCLA. She joined the faculty at UCLA in 2002.