Meghan Swanson, Ph.D.

E-MAIL: [email protected]
Advising Statement

Research Interests:

Meghan Swanson, PhD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota where she also serves as the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain Director for Training and Education. Dr. Swanson received her PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York where she studied the social communication of autistic children using eye tracking, and worked on a parent-mediated intervention for autistic toddlers. While completing postdoctoral training in neuroimaging and neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was awarded a NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00). As a developmental and cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Swanson’s program of research is focused on the neurobiology of communication for infants who develop autism. She also studies how infants and their parents communicate and how this early communication supports brain development and later language skills. The overarching goal of Dr. Swanson’s work is to identify outcome and monitoring biomarkers for the next generation of autism intervention studies. She co-directs the Cognition and Neurodevelopmental Studies (CNS) Lab at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain. She co-directs the Cognition and Neurodevelopmental Studies (CNS) Lab at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, which receives funding from the NICHD, NIMH, NIDCD, and Aligning Research to Impact Autism.

Publications

• *Moraglia, L.E., Weigman, B., Abdi, H., Styner, M., Kim, S.H., Burrows, C.A., Shen, M.D., *Ravi, S., Wolff, J.J., Dager, S.R., Hazlett, H.C., Pandey, J., Schultz, R.T., Girault, J.B., Botteron, K.N., Marrus, N., Estes, A.M., St. John, T., Zheng, G., Piven, J., Swanson, M.R., the IBIS Network. Brain Morphometry in Infants Later Diagnosed With Autism is Related to Later Language Skills. Human Brain Mapping. 2025; 46(7): e70221. https://doi-org.ezp2.lib.umn.edu/10.1002/hbm.70221 
  
• *Estrada, K. A., *Govindaraj, S., Abdi, H., *Moraglia, L. E., Wolff, J. J., Meera, S. S., Dager, S. R., McKinstry, R. C., Styner, M. A., Zwaigenbaum, L., Piven, J., Swanson, M. R., for the IBIS Network. Language exposure during infancy is negatively associated with white matter microstructure in the arcuate fasciculus. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 2023; 61: 101240. PMID: 37060675 PMCID: PMC10130606 doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101240 
  
• Swanson, M. R., Hazlett, H. C. White matter as a monitoring biomarker for neurodevelopmental disorder intervention studies. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. 2019; 11(1), 33. PMID: 31839003 PMCID: PMC6912948 doi: 10.1186/s11689-019-9295-8 
• Swanson, M. R., Wolff, J. J., Shen, M. D., Styner, M., Estes, A., Gerig, G., McKinstry, R. C., Botteron, K. N., Piven, J., Hazlett, H. C. Development of white matter circuitry in infants with Fragile X Syndrome. JAMA Psychiatry. 2018; 75(5), 505-513. PMID: 29617515 PMCID: PMC6026861 doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.0180