Dr. Dapretto is a developmental neuroscientist presently appointed as Associate 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 then acquired expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) under the guidance 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 three grants (funded by the Cure Autism Now foundation, the M.I.N.D. Research Institute at UC Davis, and the National Alliance for Autism Research) to study the neural basis of the persistent communicative impairments observed in autism. Her work has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Neuron, Brain, and Nature Neuroscience. Using several neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, 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, childhood onset schizophrenia, and dyslexia, and (iii) examine the neural basis of linguistic and communicative functions in the adult brain since studies on adults provide a normative developmental endpoint for future developmental investigations and can also address issues of brain plasticity. Dr. Dapretto currently is Co-Investigator with Dr. Bookheimer on the CPEA imaging study at UCLA entitled “Functional Imaging of Social Communication in Autism.”