Marian Sigman, Ph.D. is Director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), one of eight NIH-funded STAART centers in the nation, as well as Director of the UCLA Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism (CPEA). The focus of her current research is to determine the biological and environmental contributors to social communicative deficits and skills in autism. Dr. Sigman holds academic appointments at UCLA as Professor in both the Department of Psychology and the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. After receiving a Ph.D. in Psychology from Boston University, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at UCLA before joining the faculty in 1977. Dr. Sigman’s autism research has spanned over 25 years with funding by NIH since 1980. She is the first President of the International Society for Autism Research, previously was Chair of the Advisory Committee of the National Childcare Study, served for five years as Associate Editor of Child Development, the leading journal in the field of developmental psychology, and was founding president of the International Society for Infant Studies. Dr. Sigman is widely published in her field and is co-author of the book, Children with Autism: A Developmental Perspective (1977). For 18 years, she served as Training Director of the NIMH-funded UCLA Research Training Program in Childhood Psychopathology. Dr. Sigman has supervised the research of over 12 postdoctoral fellows and 30 graduate students in clinical and developmental psychology and she was named outstanding research mentor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA in 2000.