Jed Elison

Assistant Professor, Institute of Child Development

E-MAIL: [email protected]

Research Interests:

My laboratory studies typical and atypical brain and behavioral development during the first 5 years of postnatal life. We’re primarily interested in the intersection of infant social cognition, the development of the social brain, and the emergence of clinically impairing behaviors during the toddler and preschool-age periods. Much of our work focuses on 1) basic principles of postnatal human brain development and 2) early identification of risk for autism spectrum disorder.

We use various methods including magnetic resonance imaging during natural sleep (including DWI and fcMRI), direct assessments of child behavioral and cognitive development (including eye-tracking technology, experimental paradigms, and standardized assessments), as well as parent report of child behavior. We have also been collecting various biological samples (salivary DNA, fecal samples for gut microbiota, and breast milk samples for nutritive and non-nutritive compounds) to elucidate pathways of genetic and environmental risk to developing neural circuitry.


Selected Publications:

(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)

  • Burrows CA, Bodfish JW, Wolff JJ, Vollman EP, Altschuler MR, Botteron KN, Dager SR, Estes AM, Hazlett HC, Pruett JR Jr, Schultz RT, Zwaigenbaum L, Piven J, Elison JT; IBIS Network. Cataloguing and characterizing interests in typically developing toddlers and toddlers who develop ASD. Autism Res. 2021 Aug;14(8):1710-1723.
  • Day TKM, Elison JT. A broadened estimate of syntactic and lexical ability from the MB-CDI. J Child Lang. 2021 May 11:1-18.
  • Stallworthy IC, Lasch C, Berry D, Wolff JJ, Pruett JR Jr, Marrus N, Swanson MR, Botteron KN, Dager SR, Estes AM, Hazlett HC, Schultz RT, Zwaigenbaum L, Piven J, Elison JT; IBIS Network. Variability in responding to joint attention cues in the first year is associated With autism outcome. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2021 Jun 2:S0890-8567(21)00294-X.
  • Doyle CM, Lasch C, Elison JT. Emerging evidence for putative neural networks and antecedents of pediatric anxiety in the fetal, neonatal, and infant periods. Biol Psychiatry. 2021 Apr 1;89(7):672-680.
  • Jacob S, Wolff JJ, Steinbach MS, Doyle CB, Kumar V, Elison JT. Neurodevelopmental heterogeneity and computational approaches for understanding autism. Transl Psychiatry. 2019 Feb 4;9(1):63.
  • Dalrymple KA, Wall N, Spezio M, Hazlett HC, Piven J, Elison JT. Rapid face orienting in infants and school-age children with and without autism: Exploring measurement invariance in eye-tracking. PLoS One. 2018 Aug 28;13(8):e0202875.
  • Sifre R, Lasch C, Fenoglio A, Georgieff MK, Wolff JJ, Elison JT. Restricted, repetitive, and reciprocal social behavior in toddlers born small for gestation duration. J Pediatr. 2018;200:118-124.
  • Howell BR, Styner MA, Gao W, Yap PT, Wang L, Baluyot K, Yacoub E, Chen G, Potts T, Salzwedel A, Li G, Gilmore JH, Piven J, Smith JK, Shen D, Ugurbil K, Zhu H, Lin W, Elison JT. The UNC/UMN Baby Connectome Project (BCP): An overview of the study design and protocol development. Neuroimage. 2018 Mar 22. pii: S1053-8119(18)30259-3.
  • Swanson MR, Shen MD, Wolff JJ, Elison JT, Emerson RW, Styner MA, Hazlett HC, Truong K, Watson LR, Paterson S, Marrus N, Botteron KN, Pandey J, Schultz RT, Dager SR, Zwaigenbaum L, Estes AM, Piven J.  Subcortical brain and behavior phenotypes differentiate infants with autism wersus language delay.  Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2017;2:664-672.
  • Rizvi RF, Marquard JL, Seywerd MA, Adam TJ, Elison JT, Hultman GM, Harder KA, Melton GB. Usability evaluation of an EHR's clinical notes interface from the perspective of attending and resident physicians: An exploratory study.  Stud Health Technol Inform. 2017;245:1128-1132.
  • Hazlett HC, Gu H, Munsell BC, Kim SH, Styner M, Wolff JJ, Elison JT, et al. Early brain development in infants at high risk for autism spectrum disorder. Nature. 2017;542:348-351.
  • Eggebrecht AT, Elison JT, Feczko E, et al. Joint attention and brain functional connectivity in infants and toddlers. Cereb Cortex 2017;27:1709-1720.
  • Wolff JJ, Jacob S, Elison JT. The journey to autism: insights from neuroimaging studies of infants and toddlers. Dev Psychopathol. 2018;30(2):479-495.
  • Piven J, Elison JT, Zylka MJ. Towards a conceptual framework for early brain and behavioral development in autism. Mol Psychiatry. 2017;22(10):1385-1394.
  • Fenoglio A, Georgieff MK, Elison JT. Social brain circuitry and social cognition in infants born preterm. J Neurodev Disord. 2017 Jul 19;9(1):27.
  • Wolff JJ, Boyd BA, Elison JT. A quantitative measure of restricted and repetitive behaviors in early childhood.  J Neurodev Disord. 2016 Aug 2;8:27.
  • Pruett JR Jr, Kandala S, Hoertel S, Snyder AZ, Elison JT, Nishino T, Feczko E, Dosenbach NU, Nardos B, Power JD, Adeyemo B, Botteron KN, McKinstry RC, Evans AC, Hazlett HC, Dager SR, Paterson S, Schultz RT, Collins DL, Fonov VS, Styner M, Gerig G, Das S, Kostopoulos P, Constantino JN, Estes AM; IBIS Network, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL, Piven J. Accurate age classification of 6 and 12 month-old infants based on resting-state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging data. Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2015;12:123-133.
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