Baby Siblings Research Consortium Held at MIDB

More than 40 researchers from across the U.S. and Canada attended the Baby Siblings Research Consortium (BSRC) meeting at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain on Nov. 4. 

The BSRC is an international multidisciplinary collaborative community of researchers committed to characterizing the earliest signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), primarily by studying infants who have an older sibling diagnosed with ASD.

Consortium attendees discussed recent BSRC research advances, including moving closer to a biomarker-based, pre-symptomatic detection of risk; and expanding the understanding of what qualifies as high-risk to include rare genetic disorders and babies who are born premature. 

MIDB researcher and Institute of Child Development Associate Professor Jed Elison, PhD, hosted the meeting and highlighted how MIDB service hubs are supporting ongoing research at the University of Minnesota and beyond to identify children who are at highest likelihood of developing ASD. 

Other MIDB research shared at the meeting included testing the feasibility of a pre-symptomatic intervention for ASD presented by Jason Wolff, PhD, associate professor of educational psychology, and Jessica Simacek, PhD, research manager, Institute on Community Integration; and evaluating whether ASD screening and diagnostic tools are working comparably in boys and girls at high-likelihood of developing ASD presented by Casey Burrows, PhD, LP, assistant professor of pediatrics. 

Elison said, “BSRC attendees loved getting to see the new MIDB building and trying out some of Minneapolis’s best food offerings including Wally’s and Owamni.”

The Autism Science Foundation, which sponsored the BSRC meeting, tweeted: “[we] left the meeting enthusiastic about the BSRC’s great work … A big thank you to Jed Elison and his team at UMN for hosting us!”